‘People on Sandbars Trying to Scratch Out a Living’ : Overpopulation Called Root of Bangladesh Storm Toll

DHAKA, Bangladesh —  The underlying cause of the terribly high death tolls in Bangladesh’s frequent storms is overpopulation, according to government officials, meteorologists and foreign aid specialists interviewed in the aftermath of the weekend cyclone that killed several thousand people here.

In fact, the storm that swept up the sprawling delta west of Chittagong was not even a very powerful one, either in absolute meteorological terms or in comparison with the 27 other cyclones that have hit the Bangladesh coast since 1960.

According to information gathered at the Dhaka meteorological center by Dr. A.M. Choudhury, the highest wind speeds never exceeded 80 m.p.h., and the biggest waves were probably no higher than 15 feet.

This placed the unnamed cyclone--the South Asian term for storms called hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and typhoons in the Pacific--at only the second level of this country’s grading system for severe storms.

The 1970 storm that left up to 500,000 persons dead here, according to most accounts, had winds of more than 140 m.p.h. and produced waves, called “tidal bores” here, of more than 30 feet. It was designated a level four storm.

4,093 Missing From Island

But the Friday night-Saturday morning storm wreaked havoc in Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most-populous country, where more than 100 million people are crammed into a territory the size of Wisconsin.

Government officials here said Wednesday that after a survey of survivors on the island of Urirchar, the site of most of the deaths, they have concluded that 4,093 are still missing and presumed dead.

The total population of the newly formed island before the storm, the government surveyors concluded, was more than 7,000.

“We are a little upset that even a moderate storm such as this could kill so many people,” said an official at the meteorological center here, a modern facility that uses photographs from U.S. weather satellites.

Those who lived on Urirchar are some of the swelling number of landless people in a country where the population density is 1,530 per square mile and where the per capita income is $105 a year, less than half that of neighboring India.

Most Not Landowners

Most of them did not own the land they farmed. The owners, described by one 20-year veteran foreign aid specialist here as “powerful, unscrupulous people,” live in the relatively safe interior of the country.

For the settlers of Urirchar and the other silt islands in the delta of the Meghna River--formed by the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers--it was a choice of living on the new land and facing the wrath of the sea or moving to the increasingly crowded cities, such as Dhaka, with its 4 million people.

“People are being pushed into areas where they know the danger,” a U.N. official said. “But for them the risk of death tomorrow is better than the risk of death today.” The situation described by this man and others involved may go down in history as one of the first times that population pressures have literally pushed people into the sea.

“The reason the country faces such enormous problems,” a senior Western diplomat said, “is the population. The proneness to natural disasters just adds to that. That is why those people are out there on sandbars trying to scratch out a living.”

‘Very Unfortunate Country’

There is no doubt that Bangladesh is disaster-prone.

“This is a very unfortunate country,” meteorologist Choudhury said. “We have all sorts of problems. If we don’t have cyclones, then we have floods. This is the heartland of the monsoon. This brings us good things, too. Lots of rain that helps our crops grow. That is why we have a population problem.”

According to a study done by Choudhury, director of the meteorological research center, there have been 27 other serious cyclones here since 1960. However, records of cyclones in the country go back as far as 1584, when one is mentioned in the court records of the Mogul Emperor Akbar.

Pictures transmitted to Dhaka by U.S. weather satellites Wednesday afternoon showed another storm forming 800 miles south of the coast of Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal and 500 miles from the Indian city of Madras. The latest storm had not yet attained the wind speed of 54 m.p.h. necessary to be classified as a cyclone.

Despite its distance from the coast--it would take the storm at least four days to arrive here--the storm has weathermen here worried.

And old-timers here, who watch the moonsoons swing in here each May, say the monsoon rains are usually ushered in by two storms. The second storm is usually worse than the first.

According to one longtime British resident, “There is still time for another one to bring the monsoon in.”