AFP/Yangon
The toll from flash floods and landslides in Myanmar after days of torrential rain is likely to rise, the UN warned yesterday, as monsoon downpours brought misery to thousands across the region.
At least 27 people have been killed and more than 150,000 affected by flooding in Myanmar in recent days, with the government declaring the four worst-hit areas in central and western Myanmar as “national disaster-affected regions”.
Scores have also perished in India, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam following floods and landslides triggered by heavy seasonal rains.
Rescue work in Myanmar has been hampered by continued downpours and the inaccessibility of many of the remote regions battered by the deluges.
In Kalay, one of the worst-hit towns in the country’s northwest Sagaing region, floodwaters on Sunday reached the roofs of houses and above the height of some coconut trees, an AFP photographer at the scene said.
Vast tracts of farmland had been swallowed up by the floodwaters, turning a normally fertile flat valley into an expansive lake.
An official at Myanmar’s Relief and Resettlement Department who asked not to be named told AFP that at least 166,000 people have now been affected by the floods.
But the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said the real figure was likely to be “significantly higher” because many areas “have still not been reached or reported on by assessment teams”.
OCHA said the official death toll of 27 was also likely an
underestimate.
“As further information becomes available, this figure is also expected to increase,” the statement warned.
Seasonal monsoon rains have also brought death and destruction to other Asian nations.
About 20 people were feared dead after a hill collapsed onto a village in India’s northeastern state of Manipur on Saturday following incessant rain, a local magistrate said.
Rescuers were Sunday clawing through mud and debris searching for bodies as well as survivors of the accident in the remote village in Chandel district bordering Myanmar.
“So far we have reports of 20 people killed when a hillock caved and trapped the villagers,” magistrate Memi Mary said by telephone from Chandel town.
Two of the worst-hit areas in Myanmar are the remote and impoverished western states of Chin and Rakhine.
The Myanmar Red Cross Society said 300 homes in Rakhine had been destroyed or damaged, with around 1,500 people
evacuated to shelters.
“The figures are expected to increase in the coming days as Red Cross assessment teams access remote areas of Rakhine affected by the flooding,” the agency’s head Maung Maung Khin said in a statement
released yesterday.
Rakhine already hosts some 140,000 displaced people, mainly Rohingya Muslims, who live in exposed makeshift coastal camps following deadly 2012 unrest between the minority group and Buddhists.
Rescue workers have been mobilised across the country but the sheer extent of the flooding is testing the government’s limited relief operations, officials admit.
In Bago region, three hours north of Myanmar’s commercial hub Yangon, floodwaters had forced more than a thousand to take shelter in a
monastery.
“There’s just too much rain this year and the dams had to let the water out,” construction worker Hla Wai, whose house was partially underwater, said at the monastery.
Myanmar’s annual monsoon is a lifeline for farmers but the rains and frequent powerful cyclones can also prove deadly, with landslides and flash floods a common occurrence.
Residents use rafts as they make their way through floodwaters in Kalay, upper Myanmar’s Sagaing region, yesterday.
