Hurricane Sidr: Trail of Horror - Canals of Life

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November 19, Dublarchar
It was the numerous canals that run through the Sundarbans and not the cyclone shelters that saved thousands in Dublarchar when cyclone Sidr hit this offshore island on the Bay with packs of winds speeding at 240km.

Dublarchar consists of eight islands Alor Kol, Meher Ali, Majher Killa, Office Killa, Manikkhali, Narikelbaria, Shelok Char and Chhaprakhali, all making 135 square kilometers together. This entire area has only five shelters that can hardly accommodate 5,000 people. The remaining inhabitants of Dublarchar 25,000 by one estimate while locals claim even more had only the canals to scurry into when winds started blowing.

This is one reason why officials believe more bodies are lying in the forests after the waves carried them away into the thick bushes.

“The wind started blowing hard at around 6 and when I reached the shelter, it was already packed,” said Kamran Ali of Majher Killa. “I begged them to take me in, but the people there pushed me away.”

Kamran had nowhere to go, but the canals and took shelter inside a fishing trawler. But when the waves, most 20-feet high, reached the canals the trawler capsized. Kamran cannot remember for how long he flowed with the surge. The only thing he could see in the total darkness around him was flashes of the phosphorous run in with the sea water. It was a terrifying time, something Kamran will never forget. Then he hit the trees and grabbed them to save himself. Hanging on to these trees saw him to the daylight the next morning.

Rajib Biswas was manning a trawler when the danger signal was raised to ten. He knew something terrible was brewing out in the sea and raced for the canals. His boat bobbed and danced, almost sank and surfaced again. Somehow he had made it. Finally when he reached a canal he found hundreds of people running along the banks.

“I just asked them to jump into the canal and swim out to me,” he said describing his instantaneous rescue operation. “As the men swum through the waves, we picked them up, grabbing some by their hair. Then we were all inside the canal and we were saved.”

His trawler tipped and tossed for hours and finally crashed into the forest. But the lives were saved.

Bimal Biswas tells a similar story. He did not care to rush to the cyclone shelter as he knew it would already be too crammed to take in any more. He took one of his brothers by the hand and ran for his life. His father started with the other brother.

“The wind was almost blowing us away. We were so tired, our legs wobbled and we felt we would not be able to make it. But then we were with hundreds of others. As soon as we got into the canal, we knew we were saved.”

Inside the rickety shelters, the situation was no better. They were crammed beyond capacity and the winds also blew away windows and doors. Seawater was gushing in.

“The shelter was simply trembling like a leaf,” describes Rabbani, a fisherman who was in one of the shelters. “We were suffocating. We did not have room to move even an inch. We were crying and praying. We thought the structure would collapse on our heads any moment.”

But finally the winds died away, the shelter survived and with it the about a thousand people holing up inside it.

The Majher Killa shelter was set up by Caritas, an NGO, in 2001 after the 1988 cyclone. Since then not a single new structure has been built here. These shelters have now withered away and become almost unusable. No one knows if they can stand another cyclone.

And these shelters have become even more useless because of the effects of global warming. The seawater level, since the shelters were built, has gone up higher.

“The seawater level at full moon is now three to four feet higher than what it used to be five years ago,” said Kamaluddin, joint secretary of Dublarchar Fishermen Group, an organization of the businessmen who run the fishing business here. “So these shelters need to be at least ten feet higher than the 13 feet that they are now.”

It was not only the canals that saved the people’s lives. The gargantuan efforts of the local businessmen also saved thousands.

Fishing on these islands runs in a sinisterly exploitative manner. The hierarchies are many. At the top are the big businessmen who fund the whole business. Then comes those called “Bahaddar”, a term derived from the Bengali word “Bahar” (meaning fleet). On one hand these Bahaddars own or manage the big trawlers and supply fish to the businessmen. On the other hand they hire the boatmen and fishermen. Then come into picture the subcontractors who supply labourers to the Bahaddars to sort out the fish once they are brought to shore. These subcontractors get a portion of the fish from the Bahadars in return for the workers they supply. The workers get a meager portion of fish from the subcontractors as salary.

So, virtually almost everyone on the islands own some amount of fish, which they stock in their thatched huts. If the fish is lost, their earnings for the whole season the season lasts from November to March — is lost, and their families, often in faraway lands, have to then go unfed.

It was because of this stock at hand that when the hurricane came, none of the poor labourers and fishermen wanted to leave their huts for safetyto this dirt-poor men the dried fish at home was more valuable than their own lives. And hardly anyone would have gone to the canals and shelters had the businessmen not engaged volunteers to literally drag the labourers out of their huts.

“I clubbed them, slapped them and yanked them out of their huts,” said Kamaluddin. “We visited the villages several times and checked if anyone was still staying back.”

The action saved lives but not all portions of livelihoods. When today the chief adviser, Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed, visited Alor Kol, one of the main demands for major medium- and long-term solution here was to build permanent structures and shelters on the islands. Structures so these poor people can save their fish. Shelters to save their lives.

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