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FENI, Bangladesh: Nearly 300,000 Bangladeshis took shelter in emergency shelters on Saturday (August 24) due to flooding that inundated large swathes of the low-lying South Asian country, disaster officials said.
The floods, caused by heavy monsoon rains, have killed at least 42 people in Bangladesh and India since the beginning of the week, many of them in landslides.
“My house is completely submerged,” Lufton Nahar, 60, told AFP at a relief station in Feni, one of the worst-hit districts near the border in India’s Tripura state.
“The water came over our roof. My brother brought us here in a boat. If he hadn’t done that, we would have died.”
The country of 170 million people is crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers and has seen frequent flooding in recent decades.
Monsoon rains cause widespread devastation every year, but climate change is altering weather patterns and increasing the number of extreme weather events.
Roads and rail lines between the capital Dhaka and the main port city of Chittagong were damaged, making it difficult to reach hard-hit areas and disrupting business activities.
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