A storm forecast to be the strongest to hit Myanmar in more than a decade is expected to make landfall near the Bangladesh border on Sunday, raising the prospect of a major humanitarian disaster.
The storm, Cyclone Mocha, formed over the southern Bay of Bengal on Thursday and has been drenching western Myanmar as it churned northeast on Saturday, with heavy rain, strong winds and storm surges forecast to continue through Sunday, according to the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System.
Myanmar and Bangladesh began deploying thousands of volunteers and ordering evacuations from low-lying areas, Agence France-Presse reported, in a region that is home to some of the world’s poorest people, who are especially vulnerable to increasingly severe weather events.
Bangladeshi authorities have instructed fishing boat operators in the Bay of Bengal to stay close to shore.
The coastal areas of Bangladesh are expected to experience heavy rain starting Saturday afternoon, Azizur Rahman, director of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, said on Friday.
Cox’s Bazar, the Bangladeshi city that is home to the world’s largest refugee encampment, has begun bracing for the weather. Muhammad Shaheen Imran, a district official, said that the city had prepared more than 550 shelters to evacuate people who might be affected by the storm.
More than a million Rohingya people live in the sprawling camps.
“We have prepared the schools around the Rohingya camps for use as shelters, if we need,” Mr. Imran said.
The storm’s sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, recorded on Saturday, were expected to rapidly strengthen and peak near 120 m.p.h. over the next 24 hours, forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center said. This would be the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean.
Lower water temperatures near the coast will slow wind speeds to 100 m.p.h. right before it makes landfall, making it equal in strength to a Category 2 hurricane. After landfall, the storm will start dissipating over Myanmar’s rugged terrain, the center added.
Cyclones are highly destructive. The term “cyclone” refers to a type of tropical cyclone — the umbrella term for all such storms, like hurricanes and typhoons — that forms in the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea, both located in the northern Indian Ocean.
Scientists say that climate change has helped intensify storms because the unusually warm ocean temperatures provide more energy to fuel them. A 2017 study based on climate models found that storms that intensify rapidly just before landfall occurred about once per century between 1976 and 2005, but might be occurring every five to ten years by the end of the 21st century.
Cyclone Mocha comes as a deadly heat wave has been searing Southeast Asia for weeks. In April, Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, hit 105.1 degrees, its highest temperature in six decades. Laos’s capital, Vientiane, reached 108.5 degrees on Saturday, the hottest temperature on record. Thailand has also recorded triple-digit temperatures.
The Bay of Bengal, in the northeastern part of the Indian Ocean, has had a long history of major storms. Cyclone Amphan killed more than 80 people in India and Bangladesh in 2020. In 2017, Cyclone Mora tore through Sri Lanka and the homes of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar, killing at least 194 people.
In 2008, Cyclone Nargis became the second-deadliest tropical cyclone on record and the deadliest in Myanmar, killing more than 135,000 people. In 2007, Cyclone Sidr struck Bangladesh, killing more than 3,000 people.
In Myanmar, the risk of devastation is compounded by its ongoing civil war, which has displaced some 1.8 million people across the country, with the region south of the Bangladesh border being an active fighting zone and home to several large refugee camps.
Saif Hasnat contributed reporting from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
