Cyclone Sidr Death Toll Rising, Likely To Rise A Lot Higher

As we've been reporting here, Cyclone Sidr slammed Bangladesh as a very powerful Category 4 hurricane yesterday. Western news outlets are reporting an ever rising death toll that now exceeds 1000.

For a Reuters report with some video from Bangladesh, go here.

The humanitarian crisis in Bangladesh is likely to be a lot worse than these initial reports. Remember the Indonesian tsunami of Christmas 2004? There, the initial reports were of a few hundred, then a few thousand deaths. The final toll was well over 200,000, and the devastation far more widespread than initially reported.

That's simply because it is very difficult for western news outlets--or anyone, for that matter--to get into the remote areas devastated by these types of natural disasters, and information flows out very slowly. (That even happens here: recall, for example, the early reports during Hurricane Katrina that New Orleans had been "spared" the worst.)

We hope the toll from Sidr will be far lower than in past storms of that magnitude to strike Bangladesh, but we fear that the as the full scope of the disaster unfolds, Bangladesh will once again be looking at tens of thousands of casualties, not to mention the millions who will be displaced from homes, farms and livelihoods in an already marginal existence.