Cyclone kills over 350 in Myanmar

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - A cyclone killed more than 350 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 outlying islands and villages that felt the full force of Cyclone Nagris, a Category 3 storm packing winds of 120 miles per hour when it hit early on Saturday.

State television, which was still off air in Yangon more than 36 hours after Nagris 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 200 km southwest of Yangon on the western fringes of the Irrawaddy delta.

Nagris, which had been gathering steam in the Bay of Bengal for several 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 email to Reuters in Bangkok. "Trees across all streets. Utility poles down. Hospitals devastated. Clean water scarce."

Earlier, state media said 19 people had been killed in Yangon and 222 in the delta, where weather forecasters had predicted a storm surge of as much as 12 feet

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