The first monsoon rains have hit camps in Bangladesh housing around a million Rohingya refugees, triggering floods and landslides but no casualties or major damage so far, officials said on Sunday.
The sites in southeastern Bangladesh are predicted to be hit by powerful cyclones and by more than 2.5 metres (eight feet) of rainfall over the coming three months of monsoon.
Bangladesh’s meteorological office said the Cox’s Bazar area, where many of the refugees live in makeshift shelters on bare hillsides, had 138 mm of rain since Saturday evening.
“Some areas like the football field areas are flooded. Some houses have been inundated with water. There have been a few landslides. The conditions are bad,” said UN refugee agency spokesperson Caroline Gluck.
Rohingya leaders said the rains have already devastated some parts of the camps and turned some dirt roads into quagmires, hindering the movement of refugees and relief materials.
Kamal Hossain, a Rohingya community leader, said at least five shanties were destroyed by landslides or strong winds over around 12 hours of a sustained downpour beginning on Saturday evening.
Last year heavy rain triggered mudslips in Cox’s Bazar and the nearby Chittagong Hill Tracts, killing at least 170 people. More than 100 died in landslides in the region in 2012, and two years earlier around 50 perished.