Cyclone turns Myanmar into war zone

Yangon: A cyclone killed hundreds of people in military-ruled Myanmar, ripping through Yangon and the Irrawaddy delta where it flattened at least two towns, officials and state media said on Sunday.

The death toll is likely to climb as the authorities manage to contact islands and villages that felt the full force of Cyclone Nargis, a Category 3 storm packing winds of 190km/h when it hit early on Saturday.

State television, which was off air in Yangon more than 36 hours after Nargis slammed into the city of 5 million, reported 20,000 homes destroyed on one island alone, a government official in the remote capital, Naypyidaw, said.

The island, Haingyi, is around 200km southwest of Yangon on the western fringes of the Irrawaddy delta.

Nargis, which had been gathering steam in the Bay of Bengal for days, devastated the former Burma's leafy main city, littering the streets with overturned cars, fallen trees and debris from battered buildings.

"Utter war zone," one diplomat said in an e-mail to Reuters in Bangkok. "Trees across all streets. Utility poles down. Hospitals devastated. Clean water scarce."

Official newspapers said only one in four buildings was left standing in Laputta and Kyaik Lat, two towns deep in the rice-producing region. There were no details of casualties.

In Yangon, many roofs were ripped off even sturdy buildings, suggesting damage would be severe in the shanty towns that lie on its outskirts.

Foreign aid workers, their movements restricted by the ruling military junta, struggled to reach many impoverished areas to assess the impact. "I have never seen anything like it," one retired government worker told Reuters.

"It reminded me of when Hurricane Katrina hit the United States."

Although the sun shone yesterday, Yangon was without power and water, and food prices had doubled overnight, with many storeholders unsure of when they would be able to replenish stocks. Most shops had sold out of candles.

An Electricity Board official said it was impossible to know when the power supply, hit-and-miss at the best of times in one of Asia's poorest countries, would be restored.

"We still have to clear the mess," the official, who did not want to be named, said.

As soldiers and police tried to clear streets and find victims beneath the rubble of fallen buildings, relief experts scrambled in neighbouring Thailand in case the junta - normally deeply distrustful of the outside world - asked for help.

"It was a direct hit on a major city," said Terje Skavdal, regional head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

All flights in and out of Yangon were cancelled.