Background
Cyclone Sidr powered through Bangladesh on 15 November 2007, devastating coastal districts and forcing millions of people to abandon their homes.
More than 3,000 people have been reported dead and over 2,000 are missing, but numbers are rising fast as the full effects of the cyclone become clear.
Most deaths were caused by the huge tidal surge that plunged into coastal villages and towns, filling the air with debris and flattening bamboo and tin houses.
Vicious 250kph winds tore down homes, schools and power lines. Roads and bridges were also seriously damaged by the cyclone.
Reaching affected areas
Communication networks are slowly being restored, making it easier for aid agencies and the government to reach all the affected areas.
Shortages of food, water and medicine are raising fears that diseases will spread fast. Dead bodies and rotten trees are also lying in many water sources, pushing the threat of disease even higher.
At the moment, survivors are most at risk from waterborne diseases such as cholera and diarrhoea, but with the onset of winter, people will also become vulnerable to cold-related illnesses, such as pneumonia.
Crops wiped out
The massive tidal surge contaminated water sources with saltwater and swept away entire harvests of crops.
Around 1 million acres of crops have been destroyed, leaving hundreds of people with little to eat and no means to earn a living. In some areas, whole paddy fields have been swept away, wiping out four months of food. There are concerns that food shortages may continue to March/April 2008.
Looking to the future
Sidr has been reported as the worst disaster to hit Bangladesh since 1991, when a massive cyclone killed 143,000 people.
Disaster preparedness measures have since been put in place, allowing millions of people to be evacuated before Sidr hit land. This prevented loss of life on the same scale as 1991, however hundreds of thousands of people will still return to their homes to find the destruction that Sidr caused.
Some people have lost everything they owned in an instant and it will take months, even years, to rebuild their lives.