A cyclone packing winds of up to 90 kilometres (56 miles) an hour lashed Bangladesh’s south-eastern coastal area, damaging houses and uprooting trees, officials said Saturday.

Cox’s Bazar police chief Motiur Rahman told AFP few casualties were reported after Cyclone Bijli weakened before making landfall late Friday.

“The cyclone was not very strong. We took precautionary measures and all people living in low-lying areas went to shelters,” he said, adding that those evacuated were allowed to return home on Saturday morning.

“Dozens of thatched houses were destroyed in the cyclone and some trees were uprooted.”

Three people had died, including a 50-year-old man and a month-old baby, both of whom had medical conditions that deteriorated while being moved to the shelters.

“A nine-year-old boy was also killed after a tree fell on his family’s corrugated tin-roofed thatched house during the cyclone,” Rahman said.

Chittagong district administrative chief Farid Uddin Ahmed, overseeing the emergency response along the 300-kilometre (186-mile) southeastern coast, said rescue workers were still trying to reach remote areas.

“We are still waiting for final reports of damage. Some houses have been hit but overall the damage is minimal because the tide was low which meant the tidal surge was not too severe.”

The port at Chittagong, the biggest in Bangladesh, reopened at midday Saturday, an official said and fishermen set sail as rough seas subsided.

Chittagong and Cox’s Bazar airports were closed from Friday afternoon and 1,000 passengers were affected by the backlog when terminals reopened Saturday, Chittagong airport spokesman Kamrul Islam told AFP.

Bangladesh frequently experiences tropical storms and cyclones during the monsoon season. Bijli is the first for the 2009 rainy season, which is just beginning in the South Asian nation.

More than 3,500 people were killed during Cyclone Sidr in November 2007, which packed winds of up to 240-kilometres an hour and was the second-strongest storm recorded in Bangladesh.

In 1970, some half a million people died when a cyclone hit the impoverished country, while an estimated 138,000 people died as a result of a cyclonic surge in 1991.

The lower death tolls in 1991 and 2007 were attributed to a network of cyclone shelters and a warning system introduced after the 1970 disaster.

In neighbouring Myanmar, the military-run government’s meteorological service urged residents of the country’s western coastal region to stay away from the sea until Bijli had passed.

In April last year Myanmar was hit by Cyclone Nargis, which left an estimated 138,000 people dead or missing and affected some 2.4 million people, mostly in its southwest delta region.

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