Landslide Kills at Least 51 in Myanmar, With More Heavy Rain on the Way
MANDALAY, Myanmar — Monsoon downpours that set off flooding and a landslide in Myanmar late last week have killed at least 51 people and left dozens more missing, the authorities said, in the deadliest natural disaster to strike a part of the nation’s southeast in decades.
“This year’s flood is the worst in my life,” U Zaw Zaw Htoo, a member of Parliament from Paung Township in Mon State, which includes the area devastated by the landslide, said on Sunday.
Thirty inches of water drowned the township on Thursday and Friday, he said. The torrential rainfall in Mon State, a finger of land stretching down Myanmar’s coast, is expected to continue over the next couple of days.
Nearly 30 houses in Thaphyu Kone village in Mon State were completely buried by mud, officials said. And as he supervised rescue efforts in Thaphyu Kone, Ko Bo Bo Win, a community activist, said he worried that the crowds of onlookers who had gathered could be swept away by another landslide.
“It’s heartbreaking to see the dead bodies,” he added.
Ma Htay Htay, a resident of Thaphyu Kone, said she had just left for work on Friday when she heard a roaring noise behind her. Turning around, she saw her house disappear under mud.
Eight members of her family are missing, she said on Sunday, adding, “I’m praying hard that I will see them alive, but I don’t really have hope.”
More than 105,000 people across Myanmar have been displaced because of flooding since June, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Environmentalists and government officials said that human activity might have exacerbated or even led to the latest natural disaster.
“I believe the root cause of the landslide was digging the mountain land, which blocked the rivers and streams,” said U Aye Zan, the chief minister of Mon State.
U Kyaw Thet Win, an environmental campaigner, said that rampant deforestation — to make way for mines and plantations, and to feed the timber trade — was worsening the effects of both floods and droughts in Myanmar.
“They thought they were only cutting down trees, but at the same time they were cutting the throats of a million people,” he said.
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis tore through the Irrawaddy Delta in southern Myanmar, killing at least 135,000 people in the nation’s deadliest natural disaster on record. The region’s farmers and fishermen were given no warning of the storm, even though weather forecasts showed the eye of the cyclone bearing down on the nation’s fertile rice bowl.
As the military junta that ruled the nation at the time dithered on accepting international aid to help with the cyclone’s aftermath, Robert M. Gates, then the United States defense secretary, accused Myanmar’s leaders of “criminal neglect.”
On Sunday, Ko Win Naing Thet, a resident of Ye town, in another Mon State township affected by the latest flooding, said that 90 percent of his village was underwater.
“My refrigerator and furniture have floated away,” he said. “Many people are still waiting to be rescued.”
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