CALCUTTA, India — Heavy rains caused deadly mudslides and slowed rescue efforts Wednesday after Cyclone Aila pounded eastern India and Bangladesh, killing at least 181 people.
The cyclone destroyed thousands of homes and stranded hundreds of thousands of people in flooded villages before it began to ease Tuesday. The death toll will likely rise in both countries as rescue workers reach cut-off areas.
Mudslides in India’s famed Darjeeling tea district killed at least 20 people overnight, said P. Zimba, a local government official.
The official death toll in India stood at 68 by Wednesday, said Ashok Mohan Chakraborty, a senior official in worst-hit West Bengal state.
Bangladesh’s Food and Disaster Management Ministry said the toll there was 113 after more bodies were found. Most victims drowned or were washed away when storm surges hit coastal areas.
Soldiers have been deployed to take food, water and medicine to hundreds of thousands of people stranded in flooded villages, Bangladeshi Minister Abdur Razzak told reporters Wednesday.
At least 500,000 villagers were affected or stranded, mostly by flash floods caused by tidal surges, said Ziaul Alam, the local administrator in Bangladesh’s Khulna district.
In India Chakraborty said at least 50 people had been rescued from rooftops in the Sundarbans, a tangle of mangrove forests that is home to one of the world’s largest tiger populations.
Conservationists expressed concern over the tigers’ fate.
At least one tiger from the flooded reserve took refuge in a house. Forest guards tranquilized it and were planning to release it once the waters subside, said Belinda Wright of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, which assisted in the operation.
It is believed about 250 tigers live on the Indian side of the Sundarbans and another 250 live on the Bangladeshi side.
Conservationists in India said water levels were too high for ecologists and forest officials to enter the area and assess the damage.
Abani Bhushan Thakur, a local forest department official in Bangladesh, said there were no reports of damage or casualties in their part of the Sundarbans mangrove forests
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Associated Press writer Farid Hossain contributed to this story.
