Arakan State military council pledges to repair storm-hit homes

By DMG 22 Apr 2022

DMG Newsroom
22 April 2022, Sittwe 

The Arakan State military council said it has tasked the concerned district administrators with repairing houses damaged by destructive windstorms that hit the state earlier this week.

“We have assigned the relevant district administrators to fix the damaged houses,” Arakan State military council spokesman U Hla Thein told DMG.

The state military council will pay the costs of repair or reconstruction of the affected houses, he said. 

“As it is an emergency, we have told them to repair houses first, and submit the bills to us later,” U Hla Thein added.

Mrauk-U Township administrator U Soe Thet told DMG that damaged houses at camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) in the township are being repaired.

“Damages were reported at 19 IDP camps, and I have been instructed to repair them all. I still don’t know the progress of the repairs, which started yesterday, and are still ongoing. I’d guess 80 percent of the houses whose roofs were blown away by the squall have been fixed by now,” said U Soe Thet.

Ashin Nandasara, the abbot of Mya Tanzaung Monastery, which hosts an IDP camp, said damaged houses at his camp are not yet repaired.

“Some houses remain as they are. Some houses whose roofs were damaged have been roofed with tarpaulin sheets. We have reported the list of damaged houses to the township General Administration Department,” the abbot told DMG on Friday.

Some 900 houses were damaged or destroyed at IDP camps in Arakan State’s Mrauk-U, Kyauktaw and Minbya townships. Some houses in urban areas and schools were also damaged by the storm.