Cyclone Toll May Exceed 100,000 : Bangladesh: Official count reaches 37,543, but tens of thousands are missing and feared dead. Premier cites ‘vast devastation,’ with many areas still inaccessible.

The bodies of thousands of victims killed in a devastating cyclone washed up Thursday on the shores of Bangladesh as the government struggled to provide relief to millions of survivors.

The official death toll for Tuesday’s cyclone, the most powerful to hit this impoverished nation, reached 37,543. But tens of thousands are missing on low-lying islands and coastal deltas, and Prime Minister Khaleda Zia said that at least 100,000 people, and possibly more, could have been killed.

“It is a vast devastation, and the loss of human lives could exceed 100,000,” Zia said on state-owned television. “The information is incomplete. . . . We fear it (the toll) could go up much more. I pray to Allah it’s not true.”

She announced that special prayers will be held today, the Muslim Sabbath, to mourn the victims and that Saturday will be a national day of mourning.

Relief workers and journalists who visited the stricken region said thousands of decomposed bodies were being brought in by the tides. Survivors searched for missing relatives among the corpses stacked up on beaches.

“I saw death, devastation, agony and misery of a magnitude I have never seen before,” said one photographer who went to the area. “The bodies were decomposed and the stench was unbearable.”

As the number of bodies floating in increased by the hour, the government struggled to ferry food, water and medicine to the millions of survivors. Vast areas hit by the cyclone were still inaccessible, and helicopters dropped essentials to people huddled on rooftops of marooned buildings.

The scale of the catastrophe at times was almost unfathomable.

Mufizur Rahman, 55, a farmer, said he saw waves “as high as mountains” sweep toward his village of Vijandya before he blacked out. He came to hours later to find that his wife, son and three daughters had been swept away.

Another villager, Rabeya Begum, said her husband was bitten by a snake while trying to grab a floating banana tree on which to perch their infant son. She said her husband died on the spot and the baby drowned.

Six members of Shafi Alam’s family were lost, he said, but he saved one son by lashing him to a coconut tree.

International relief agencies already straining to help Kurdish refugees and famine-stricken Africans began sending aid. The United States, Japan and European nations quickly pledged millions of dollars in aid in response to an appeal by Bangladesh for $1.4 billion in assistance.

Workers from the London-based relief agency, Oxfam, were among the first to begin distributing aid, pushing into areas hit hardest by the cyclone to hand out water-purification tablets, food, candles and matches from stocks in Bangladesh.

Other humanitarian agencies said they were battling communication and transportation problems.

“From our point of view this could not have come at a worse time, hot on the heels of the Kurdish refugee crisis and also the African famine which threatens to completely overshadow the other two human tragedies,” Giselle Dye, spokeswoman for Save the Children, said in London.

Relief officials warned of the outbreak of disease in crowded cyclone shelters and relief camps. Emdad Hossain, the head of relief operations of the Red Crescent Society, said many people are drinking salty, muddy water and eating half-cooked fish.

As Hossain spoke to a reporter in his Dhaka office, a message came across on the radio next to his desk.

“Water, we need potable water, sir,” said a voice over the radio. “People are dying of exposure and hunger, sir.”

Hossain said it was a message from one of the Red Crescent’s field officers, based on Teknaf Island off the southeastern coast.

The government says 10 million people lived in the area, which was battered by 20-foot-high waves and winds reaching 145 m.p.h.

At least 90% of them lost their homes, mud-and-straw huts that were submerged by waves or blown away. Tens of thousands of people, mainly the inhabitants of remote islands near the coast, are missing.

“It is a great tragedy,” said Luftar Rahman Khan, the minister of state for relief. “This is a national crisis.”

The minister painted a grim picture of the colossal damage that destroyed Bangladesh’s main port, Chittagong, wiped out much of its current rice crop and threatened next year’s crop by splashing paddies with salt water. Seventy percent of the cattle in the region drowned.

The storm flattened wide areas that took its full force along the east coast from north of the port of Chittagong to Cox’s Bazar near the Myanmar border.

Foreign diplomats said Zia’s six-week-old government seemed to be grappling with the relief effort as well as it could.

“But they’ve admitted that the need outstrips their ability to meet it,” said a Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Relief minister Khan said that six merchant ships and two naval vessels were partially sunk. “It looks as if we do not take immediate action, our Chittagong port, which is the lifeline of Bangladesh, will be lost,” he said.

The cyclone was the most powerful to hit Bangladesh. But the number of deaths reported so far is below the toll of a storm in 1970 that claimed an estimated 300,000 lives. Another massive cyclone in 1985 killed 10,000 people.

A low-lying country on the delta of three great Himalayan rivers, Bangladesh is repeatedly savaged by storms arising in the unpredictable Bay of Bengal.

KILLER STORMS

The storms called hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Caribbean are called typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean. Here are some of the century’s deadliest storms:

Date Place Deaths Nov. 13, 1970 Bangladesh 300,000 Oct. 15-16, 1942 Bengal, India 40,000 June 1-2, 1965 Bangladesh 30,000 May 28-29, 1963 Bangladesh 22,000 May 11-12, 1965 Bangladesh 17,000 May 25, 1985 Bangladesh 11,000 Sept. 18, 1906 Hong Kong 10,000 Dec. 15, 1965 Bangladesh 10,000 Aug.-Sept., 1900 Galveston, Tex. 6,000 Oct. 4-6, 1963 Caribbean 6,000

Source: World Almanac and Book of Facts, Associated Press