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KURIGRAM: The death toll from floods in Bangladesh this week has risen to eight, officials confirmed on Saturday (July 6), with heavy rains causing major rivers to burst their banks and affecting more than two million people.
The South Asian country of 170 million people is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has seen increasingly frequent flooding in recent decades.
Climate change is making rainfall more erratic and melting glaciers in the upper Himalayas.
Two teenage boys died when a boat capsized in floodwaters in Shahjadur, the northern rural town’s police chief Sabji Rana told AFP.
“There were nine people in the boat, seven of them swam to safety, but two boys could not swim and drowned,” he said.
Three other people died in two separate electrocution incidents after their boats became entangled in live wires in floodwaters, Kurigram city police chief Bishwadeb Roy told AFP.
Three other people died in flood-related incidents across the country, officials told AFP earlier this week.
The government said it had opened hundreds of shelters for people displaced by the floods and had delivered food and relief supplies to hard-hit areas in the north of the country.
“The floods have affected more than two million people. Seventeen of the country’s 64 districts have been affected,” Disaster Management Minister Kamrul Hassan told AFP.
Hassan said the flood situation in the northern region is likely to worsen in the coming days, with water levels in parts of the Brahmaputra river, one of Bangladesh’s main waterways, expected to exceed danger levels.
Eight of the nine rural towns in the worst-hit Kurigram district were submerged by floods, local disaster and relief official Abdul Hai told AFP.
“We often experience floods here. But this year the water level is very high. In three days the water level of the Brahmaputra has risen by 6 to 8 feet (2 to 2.5 metres),” Abdul Ghafoor, a local councillor in the area, told AFP.
“The floods have submerged more than 80 percent of the houses in my area. We are trying to deliver food, especially rice and cooking oil. But there is a drinking water crisis.”
Bangladesh is in the midst of its annual summer monsoon, which brings 70% to 80% of the annual rainfall to South Asia and often causes loss of life and property through floods and landslides.
Rainfall is difficult to predict and varies widely, but scientists say climate change is making the monsoon more intense and erratic.
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