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Floods in India claimed more than 1,000 lives |
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October 3, 2000
MASLANDPUR, OCT 2 (AP) - At 70 Geeta Biswas has seen wars and epidemics. Not any deadly floods. That was until last week when she and her neighbors watched helplessly their mud walled houses being swept away by swirling flood waters even on a rainless sunny day. Village after village in this eastern Bangladesh region went under water in a day or two. Starting from Sept. 18 the floods, fed by late monsoon rains and unexpected release of waters from manmade reservoirs along dozens of irrigation dams, claimed more than 1,000 lives and swept away millions of houses leaving 20 million people either marooned or homeless in India and neighboring Bangladesh. As relief workers struggled to reach the remote and inaccessible villages using speed boats fresh waves of floods submerged Sunday and Monday new areas in some parts of West Bengal, the hardest-hit Indian state. "I've heard that floods are caused by rains. But we have had this flood even on a sunny day," Geeta said, reclining her frail body on a heap of unwashed clothes she could save while fleeing her home at Chandipur village outside the rail station town of Maslandpur. "Why this flood when there is no rain?" wondered an exhausted Geeta as she and six other members of her family waited for hours in the hope that a train will ferry them to a relief camp. Geeta echoed feelings of the flood victims along this region that borders on western Bangladesh, also hit by late monsoon floods. True it rained heavily for three days in Bihar and some parts of West Bengal before the floods occurred. But experts said the rainwater alone did not cause the floods. "The latest floods can't be blamed on rains alone. The waters released from the reservoirs of dams combined with rains to cause this havoc," R. N. Golder, director at West Bengal Meteorological Department told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. For at least three days engineers released up to 250,000 cubic feet of water per second to save the dams from being washed away under pressure of excess water brought in by rains, according to news reports. Irrigation officials were not available because most offices are closed to celebrate a Hindu festival. According to Mamta Banerjee, an opposition leader in West Bengal, the floods were caused deliberately to divert public attention from the state's worsening law and order to a new crisis. India's West Bengal state is governed by a communist coalition. The West Bengal government denied Banerjee's allegations. "She is trying to exploit a natural disaster and human miseries to benefit politically," said Buddhadev Bhattacharya, West Bengal's deputy chief minister. Mud embankments that have been built over the years to divert river water for irrigation have collapsed creating more problems for the people. The embankments are creating obstacles in the drainage of flood waters into the Bay of Bengal. "It will take time for the flood waters to recede because hundreds of small embankments block the passage of water into the sea," Niranjan Halder, a journalist wrote in Calcutta's Protidin newspaper. Few in the flood-hit areas disagree that the floods caught everyone off guard. The areas that were affected by the floods are known for growing rice that depends on irrigation water. When the flood waters gushed through their fields, people scrambled for a few boats to go to safer places. Most villagers do not possess boats since the fields rarely go under flood waters. "The lack of boats compounded miseries of many homeless people. Many lives could have been saved if we had boats available," Ranjit Biswas, a village headman said at Belghuria in North 24 Parganas district. |