Word: bengals
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...face of the Pakistani official was ashen. Fresh from an inspection of the cyclone-ravaged coastline of the Bay of Bengal, he described the scene: "No vulture, no dog, and even no insects were to be found anywhere. Just heaps of human bodies and carcasses." More than two weeks after the storm had shrieked across the low-lying Ganges River Delta, the enormity of the havoc wrought by its 120-m.p.h. winds and 20-ft. waves could still only be sensed, not measured. Toward week's end, some 6,000 Ansar militiamen and volunteers trudged into the flatlands...
...Danger. Why had the delta's 3,000,000 Bengalis been so unprepared? A U.S. weather satellite's photo of severe weather in the Bay of Bengal had been received in the East Pakistani capital of Dacca more than ten hours before the cyclone struck. A warning -moha bipod shonket (big danger coming)-was broadcast, but someone forgot to include a code number indicating the force of the expected storm...
Above the howling wind and the driving rain, the villagers of Manpura Island could hear an unholy roar welling up from the Bay of Bengal. "It was pitch dark," said Abdul Jabbar last week, ''but suddenly I saw a gigantic, luminous crest heading toward our village." Jabbar managed to survive the lethal 120-m.p.h. cyclone and the 20-ft. tidal wave that followed, but most of his neighbors were less fortunate. All but 5,000 of Manpura Island's 30,000 people died in the surging waters. Most of the island's cattle, sheep, goats...
...pole and was swept 26 miles to safety. Several survivors held tenaciously to the tails of terrified cattle. Six children were washed ashore in a wooden chest; they had been thrown into it by their grandfather, but he perished and the tiny ark bobbed precariously in the Bay of Bengal for three days...
Trickles of Relief. Unprotected and overpopulated, the region is a disaster waiting to happen. And disaster has struck repeatedly. An 1876 cyclone killed 200,000 in the Bay of Bengal, and no fewer than eight major cyclones hit the region in the 1960s. The Indian Ocean's cyclones-the equivalent of the Atlantic's hurricanes and the Pacific's typhoons-are gigantic tropical storms that act like outsize rotary engines, sucking up and circulating the moist air that hangs over the balmy waters of the Bay of Bengal. The heat energy released in this process energizes...