Winds of up to 210 km/h ripped away tin roofs and brought down a communications tower

Storm surges whipped up by a powerful cyclone inundated the Myanmar port city of Sittwe.

Winds of up to 210 kilometres per hour ripped away tin roofs and brought down a communications tower.

Parts of Sittwe, the capital of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, were flooded.

Some 400,000 people were evacuated in the country and low-lying neighbouring Bangladesh.

Authorities and aid agencies are scrambling to avert heavy casualties from one of the strongest storms to hit the region in recent years.

Myanmar has been plunged into chaos since a junta seized power two years ago.

After a crackdown on protests, a resistance movement is fighting the military on various fronts.

Across Rakhine state and the north west of the country about six million people were already in need of humanitarian assistance.

Over a million people have been displaced, according to the U.N. humanitarian office.

In Bangladesh, authorities moved around 300,000 people to safer areas before the storm hit.

Rohingya refugees inside densely-populated camps in the Cox’s Bazar in the south east of the country hunkered down inside their ramshackle homes.

More than a million Rohingya refugees live in sprawling camps prone to flooding and landslides after having fled a military-led crackdown in Myanmar in 2017.