Bangladeshi authorities announced on Sunday (November 10th) that Cyclone Bulbul, which hit Bangladesh and India with high winds and torrential rains, left 14 people dead and forced two million Bangladeshi to spend the night in shelters. .

The cyclone, which was accompanied by winds reaching 120 km / h, hit the coastal areas of these two neighboring countries on Saturday night, causing airports and ports to close.

Seven people died in the state of West Bengal in eastern India, including two when trees fell on their homes and another after the fall of a tree in Calcutta.

The collapse of a wall in the neighboring state of Odisha (northeast) also caused a death.

In Bangladesh, six people were killed after being killed, including five by trees, and at least 20 people were injured. Five others were reported missing after a fishing boat sank on a river near the southern island of Bhola.

The hurricane has also damaged about 4,000 homes made mostly of mud and sheet metal, the secretary in charge of disaster management said.

In the coastal region of Khulna in southern Bangladesh, the most affected in the country, uprooted trees fell on the roads, preventing access to this area.

The low-lying parts were flooded, told AFP Enamur Rahman, the minister in charge of the disaster management.

The cyclone declined in intensity as it entered the interior, the authorities said.

Cyclone Bulbul first struck the Sundarbans, a region of innumerable arms and canals in the Ganges delta, home to the largest mangrove forest in the world.

Shared between Bangladesh and India, this region is also home to the threatened Bengal tiger.

Two million people evacuated in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, more than two million people have been evacuated and settled in more than 5,500 special shelters.

Bangladeshi soldiers were sent to villages and tens of thousands of volunteers went door-to-door, calling residents by loudspeakers to flee, some villages being below sea level.

Some 1,500 tourists remained stranded on St. Martin's Island, in the Bay of Bengal, as maritime services were interrupted by the weather.

In India, the nearly 120,000 evacuees began to return to their homes as the cyclone dwindled, officials said.

Bangladesh is a flat country, mostly at less than 12 meters above sea level, and 10% of its territory below that level. It is regularly affected by cyclones that have made hundreds of thousands of deaths over the last decades, and whose frequency and intensity has increased in recent years.

With AFP