(Agencies)
Updated: 2007-11-19 15:42

"We tied the corners of our tin roof to coconut trees with ropes, so it wouldn't fly away but our kitchen was destroyed and many trees around fell," said Shafiqul Islam, who works at a roadside gas station near Madaridpur, another hard-hit coastal district.

Thanks to an effective early warning system, at least 1.5 million coastal villagers fled to shelters before the storm. But Islam and his family chose to stay at home.

"We didn't think it would be so bad, but when the wind roared over us, it was very scary. We huddled together under the bed," he said.

Sidr's 150-mph winds smashed tens of thousands of homes in southwestern Bangladesh and ruined thousands of acres of crops.

Every year, storms batter Bangladesh, a country of 150 million, often killing large numbers of people. The most deadly recent storm was a tornado that leveled 80 villages in northern Bangladesh in 1996, killing 621 people.

Only two people were killed in Bangladesh by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was spawned off Indonesia's Sumatra island by a magnitude-9 earthquake, hitting a dozen countries and killing at least 216,858, according to government and aid agency figures considered the most reliable in each country.

Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive natural disaster in US history, killed 1,600 people across the Gulf Coast, destroyed or severely damaged more than 200,000 homes and made more than 800,000 people homeless overnight.

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