Hundreds of thousands flee as Cyclone Mocha thunders towards Myanmar and Bangladesh

Cyclone Mocha was packing winds of up to 240km per hour (149 miles per hour), according to the Zoom Earth website, which classed it as a Super Cyclone

It was expected to weaken before making landfall on Sunday morning near Cox’s Bazar, where nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in flimsy shelters

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Women take shelter with their children in Shahpori island on the outskirts of Teknaf, Bangladesh on Saturday ahead of Cyclone Mocha’s landfall. Photo: AFP

Published: 2:47am, 14 May 2023

Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from the coasts of Myanmar and Bangladesh on Saturday as the region’s most powerful cyclone for more than a decade churned across the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclone Mocha was packing winds of up to 240km per hour (149 miles per hour), according to the Zoom Earth website, which classed it as a Super Cyclone.

A dangerous category four on the Saffir-Simpson scale, it was expected to weaken before making landfall on Sunday morning between Cox’s Bazar, where nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in camps largely made up of flimsy shelters, and Sittwe on Myanmar’s western Rakhine coast.

A satellite image shows storm Mocha intensify into an extremely severe cyclonic storm. Photo: India Meteorological Department via AP

But Bangladeshi authorities moved 190,000 people in Cox’s Bazar and nearly 100,000 in Chittagong to safety, divisional commissioner Aminur Rahman told Agence France-Presse late on Saturday.

“They were evacuated to nearly 4,000 cyclone shelters,” he said.

Forecasters in Dhaka were predicting a storm surge up to nearly four metres (12ft) high, which could inundate low-lying coastal and riverine villages.

On the other side of the border, Sittwe residents piled possessions and pets into cars, trucks and tuk-tuks and headed for higher ground on Saturday, Agence France-Presse reporters saw.