Global Courant 2023-05-12 11:26:59
Another storm, expected to be the strongest to hit Myanmar in more than a decade, is expected to make landfall near the Bangladesh border on Sunday, raising the prospect of a major humanitarian disaster.
The storm, Cyclone Mocha, formed over the southern Bay of Bengal on Thursday and has already drenched western Myanmar as it swept northeast on Friday, bringing heavy rains, strong winds and storm surges expected to last through Sunday, according to the Global disaster warning and coordination system.
Myanmar and Bangladesh started deploying thousands of volunteers and order evacuations from low-lying areas, Agence France-Presse reported, in a region home to some of the world’s poorest people, who are particularly vulnerable to increasingly severe weather conditions.
The storm’s sustained winds of 60 mph, recorded Thursday evening, were expected to increase to 110 mph by the time it made landfall, forecasters from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center said.
If that prediction is correct, Mocha would be the strongest storm to make landfall in Myanmar since Cyclone Giri, which brought gusts of 230 km/h in 2010, according to the Historical cyclone tracks from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That storm killed at least 45 people in Burma.
Cyclones are very destructive. The term “cyclone” refers to a type of tropical cyclone — the umbrella term for all such storms, such as hurricanes and typhoons — that form in the Bay of Bengal or Arabian Sea, both located in the northern Indian Ocean.
Scientists say climate change has helped intensify storms as unusually warm ocean temperatures provide more energy to fuel tropical cyclones.
Cyclone Mocha comes as a deadly heat wave that has scorched Southeast Asia for weeks. In April Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, reached 105.1 degrees, the highest temperature in six decades. The capital of Laos, Vientiane, reached 108.5 degrees on Saturday, the highest temperature ever recorded. Thailand has also recorded triple-digit temperatures.
The Bay of Bengal, in the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean, has a long history of major storms. Cyclone Amphan killed more than 80 people in India and Bangladesh in 2020. In 2017, Cyclone Mora swept through Sri Lanka and the homes of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar. 194 people.
In 2008 Cyclone Nargis became the second deadliest tropical cyclone on record and the deadliest in Myanmar, killing more than 135,000 people. In 2007 Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh, killing more than 3,000 people.
In Myanmar, the risk of devastation is heightened by the ongoing civil war, which has been dispelled about 1.8 million people across the country, with the region south of the Bangladesh border being an active combat zone and home to several major refugee camps.
