Myanmar cyclone victims had nowhere to escape - WMO

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - People in Myanmar appear to have been warned that a cyclone was approaching, but had nowhere to escape for protection from the storm, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Wednesday.

The United Nations estimates as many as 2.4 million people are struggling to survive in areas of the former Burma hardest-hit by the May 2 cyclone and its three-metre high storm surge that flooded and destroyed entire villages.

Nearly 134,000 people are believed to be dead or missing.

Dieter Schiessl, the United Nations agency's director of weather and disaster risk reduction, said those in the storm-hit Irrawaddy Delta did not know how to respond to the warnings that the military government disseminated about Cyclone Nargis.

"Most of the people decided to take shelter by staying home ... That turned out to be a quite disastrous decision," he told a news conference in Geneva, where the WMO is based.

Unlike in Bangladesh and other flood-prone countries, there were no evacuation systems or protective shelters set up in Myanmar to help people in the path of the storm, Schiessl said.

"There was no alternative for them," he said.

A team of WMO experts visited Myanmar to evaluate how the storm was tracked and prepared for in the Bay of Bengal country that is very rarely struck by strong tropical cyclones.