"It was a hot, humid day and overcast," recalled Yakub Ali, a 40-year-old farmer on the tiny Bangladeshi island of Urirchar. "First came the dark and the menacing clouds. Soon the wind started whistling ominously. Then the heavy rains began to fall." At first Yakub thought with relief that the torrents might disperse the stifling heat, which can exceed 100 degrees F at this time of year. But the downpour quickly gained greater and still greater force. As the alarmed farmer walked out of his hut, he came upon his neighbors gathering in the night. There was frightened talk that Danger Signal No. 9, a cyclone warning calling for immediate evacuation, had been announced on the radio. It was news to Yakub.
On the previous day, Indian meteorologists had alerted the Bangladesh government in Dhaka that a killer storm was sweeping toward the country's myriad offshore islets and southern flatlands along the Bay of Bengal. Danger Signals Nos. 4 and 5, warning of winds racing above 50 m.p.h., had been hoisted in the port of Chittagong, and fishermen and other sailors had been urged to stay close to the shore. Hourly warnings were broadcast on state-run radio and television, advising residents in the imperiled areas to seek shelter instantly. But most of the impoverished squatters who crowd the islets are too poor to own radios, and many of those who heard the warnings may have shrugged them off as a false alarm.
As wind and water gathered force, however, Yakub Ali knew that something ominous was on the way. Hurrying back to his homestead, he awoke his wife, his ten-year-old son and his younger brother and urged them to come along to Urirchar's only concrete building, a two-story Forestry Department complex a little more than half a mile away. By then the tide had begun to rise. Yakub and his family started running; all around them people were racing for safety.
A few minutes later, still hundreds of yards from the Forestry building, Yakub felt himself lifted by a towering wave. Frantically he looked around for his family, but all was lost in the darkness, behind blinding sheets of rain. "Everything was dark -- rain, rain. I was floating for several hours," he recalled of the hours he passed at sea before sailors from a naval vessel pulled him to safety. "I am a good swimmer, but it was terrible. I really do not know how I survived. And where," he asked, tears in his eyes, "where are my near and dear ones?"
The same sad question haunted all of Urirchar after the night of the raging elements. While the sea crashed over the 20-sq.-mi. island, whose highest point is only 10 ft. above sea level, families were torn asunder. In desperation, people clung to the rafters of the Forestry Department building or to trees or to anything else not swept away by the terrifying storm. "I survived by holding on to a branch," said Akmal Hossain, a 42-year-old farmer. "Everything happened after midnight, and before I could realize the gravity of the situation, water and water engulfed the island." By the time furious wind and swirling wave had passed, Hossain found that he had lost his wife, his daughter and his aged mother.