The flood situation in the hardest-hit areas in the north and north-east is likely to worsen over the next 24 hours, officials said.
Heavy monsoon rains in Bangladesh’s northeastern and northern regions have stranded hundreds of thousands of people and forced authorities to use the military for evacuation and relief work, according to local media and official statements.
The Bangladesh military’s Inter Service Public Relations Office said on its website early Saturday that soldiers were deployed as floods devastated the north-eastern districts of Sunamganj and Sylhet, where thousands of homes were submerged and electricity cut off.
In a statement on Friday, the government’s Flood Forecasting and Warning Center in Dhaka, the country’s capital, said water levels are rising in all major rivers across the country. The country has about 130 rivers.
The center said the flooding situation in the hard-hit Sunamganj and Sylhet districts in the north-eastern region, as well as Lalmonirhat, Kurigram, Nilphamari and Rangpur districts in northern Bangladesh is likely to worsen in the next 24 hours.
Hafiz Ahmed, manager of Osmani International Airport in Sylhet, said the airport was suspended for three days from Friday as flood waters almost reached the runway.
Last month, a pre-monsoon flash flood triggered by inrushing water from the north-eastern states of India hit the northern and north-eastern regions of Bangladesh, destroying crops and damaging houses and the road network.
Bangladesh was just recovering from this shock when this year’s monsoon hit a few days ago, bringing new rains that flooded the same regions again.
Bangladesh, a nation of 160 million people, lies low and faces the threat of climate change-related natural disasters such as floods and hurricanes. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, about 17 percent of Bangladesh’s people would need to be relocated over the next decade if global warming continues at the current rate.