Word: storms
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...cyclone. But a few dozen trucks will do little to allay the vast destruction. In Bogalay, once a prosperous trading port, one third of buildings have collapsed. At a jetty along the Irrawady, two nearly week-old bodies, an adult and a child, lay among the storm's detritus of plywood, bamboo and coconut husks. Near the corpses, people went about their lives, tying bamboo poles together to build temporary lodging and jostling for limited supplies of cooking oil and diesel fuel. Prices have at least doubled, a further blow to people who lost all their savings when Nargis swept...
Although Burma's ruling military junta has been criticized for not adequately warning citizens about the approaching storm, locals conceded that government radio had announced that a cyclone was approaching. Rangoon's iconic Shwedagon pagoda, for example, was closed on the afternoon of May 2 because of the cyclone. But there has never been such a destructive storm in living memory in Burma. Nearly everyone ignored the government warning and went to sleep as usual in their flimsy shacks that night. By 9 p.m., delta residents realized this was no normal storm. Ei Phyu Aung, a 14-year-old girl...
...were holed up in a monastery. The widowed mother lost everything, save the clothes on her family's back. "I have nothing left," she says. "My children are my only savings." Inland in the village of Thar Yar Wae, only three of the village's 369 buildings survived the storm. Still, residents feel lucky because no one died. Now they are waiting for government officials to come and talk about whether there are enough funds to help rebuild the school and nearby monasteries. But village chief Ohn Hwe already knows the answer. "There will not be enough money," he says...
...recalls boatman Myint Swe, and for three days afterwards the Pyapon River was clogged with bodies. Like hundreds of other delta villages, Myinkakon had few sturdy buildings to shelter in and no higher ground to flee to. And anyway, says Myint Swe, there was no way to outrun the storm surge, a wall of fast-moving water taller than the tallest man, which raced out of the darkness without warning and swept away tens of thousands of lives across the low-lying region...
When the surge came, Myint Swe had somehow bundled his wife and eight children into his small boat and tethered it to a coconut tree. Then he climbed the tree and held on. Below him, the boat below pitched wildly as his terrified family safely rode out the storm...