Severe floods in Bangladesh this week have claimed eight lives and affected over two million people after heavy rains caused major rivers to overflow, officials confirmed on Saturday.
The South Asian nation, home to 170 million people and crisscrossed by hundreds of rivers, has experienced increasingly frequent floods in recent decades. Climate change has made rainfall more erratic and contributed to melting glaciers upstream in the Himalayan mountains, exacerbating the situation.
In Shahjadur, a northern rural town, two teenage boys drowned when a boat capsized in floodwaters. Sabuj Rana, the town's police chief, reported that the boys were among nine people in the small boat; seven others managed to swim to safety.
Bishwadeb Roy, a police chief in Kurigram, revealed that three people had died in two separate electrocution incidents when their boats became entangled with live electricity wires in floodwaters. Another three deaths in separate flood-related incidents were reported earlier in the week by officials.
The government has responded by opening hundreds of shelters for those displaced by the floods and distributing food and relief supplies to the hardest-hit districts in the northern region of the country.
"More than two million people have been affected by the floods. Seventeen of the country's 64 districts have been impacted," Kamrul Hasan, the secretary of the country's disaster management ministry, told AFP.
Hasan warned that the flood situation might worsen in the north over the coming days, as the Brahmaputra, one of Bangladesh's main rivers, is flowing above danger levels in some areas.
In Kurigram, the worst-hit district, eight out of nine rural towns have been inundated by floodwaters, according to local disaster and relief official Abdul Hye. Abdul Gafur, a local councilor, described the severity of the flooding: "We live with floods here. But this year the water was very high. In three days, the Brahmaputra rose by 6ft to 8ft (2m-2.5m). Floodwater has inundated more than 80 percent of homes in my area. We are trying to deliver food, especially rice and edible oil. But there is a drinking water crisis."
Bangladesh is currently in the midst of the annual summer monsoon, which brings 70-80 percent of South Asia's annual rainfall and is associated with regular flooding and landslides. While the rainfall can be hard to predict and varies significantly, scientists warn that climate change is making the monsoon stronger and more erratic.
