Natural Disasters

Hatiya sits directly in the path of Bay of Bengal cyclones, and its low, shifting char geography leaves it with little natural shelter. The 1970 Bhola cyclone was catastrophic here: roughly half of the estimated 175,000 people then living on the island are believed to have died in a single night, among the more than 300,000 deaths the storm caused across the coast. The 1991 cyclone, with winds over 235 km/h and a storm surge around six metres, struck again barely two decades later.

Beyond single storms, erosion is a chronic disaster on Hatiya: the island's northern shoreline has retreated by roughly 12 km over recent decades, at rates recorded as high as 100–550 metres a year in places, regularly forcing entire communities to relocate. Cyclone shelters, embankments and the Forest Department's mangrove afforestation on Nijhum Dwip are the main defences in place today, alongside early-warning systems that have sharply reduced (though not eliminated) storm death tolls since 1991.