Word: brahmaputra
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...Demonic winds of crushing force. The horror left behind: 125,000 lives lost, and still counting. A world used to human-scale catastrophes -- plane crashes, say, that kill a few hundred at most -- cannot absorb the biblical dooms that visit Bangladesh. Straddling the conjoined mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, two of the Indian subcontinent's mightiest rivers, the country is regularly drowned by flood crests surging downstream or scourged by whirlwinds from the sea. Of the 20th century's 10 deadliest storms, seven have devoured their victims at the head of the Bay of Bengal...
...after it and neighboring India, Bhutan and Nepal were pelted by what may have been the heaviest monsoon rains in 70 years. An estimated 30 million Bangladeshis were left homeless. Many hundreds perished, though the full extent of the casualties will not be known until the waters of the Brahmaputra River recede enough for rescue teams to reach outlying villages...
This year's floods follow a devastating inundation in 1987, and worse may be in store. The problem begins beyond Bangladesh in a 600,000-sq.-mi. watershed of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna river systems. All flow through Bangladesh and empty into the Bay of Bengal. The watershed contains the southern slopes of the Himalayas in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan, where the hillsides have been ravaged by deforestation. With the denuded soil no longer able to absorb monsoon rains, the savage runoff increases year by year in speed and volume, bringing with it ever larger loads of silt...
Those rivers were already at normal flood levels by mid-August, when one- fifth of Bangladesh is typically covered by floodwaters. Late in the month a sudden and intense rainfall centered in the northeastern Indian state of Assam sent an additional torrent surging southward into the Brahmaputra. Only at the end of August did Dhaka officials realize the magnitude of the danger. Admits Ershad: "We were taken by surprise -- that so much water could come." By Sept. 3, nearly every measuring station on the Brahmaputra had registered record levels...
Even then, the territory was an exotic ethnic mix that included Indo-Aryan Assamese, Assamese-speaking Hindus in the Brahmaputra valley, dozens of hill tribes of Mongoloid stock, and indigenous plains tribes. Then came successive waves of Bengalis, both Hindus and Muslims, who were first brought in by the British to run the tea plantations and the civil service of the British raj. Bengali immigration intensified during partition in 1947 and again after the creation of Bangladesh. Although its population is one of the fastest growing on the subcontinent, Assam has only 254 people per sq. km. West Bengal...