Cyclone Nargis Tore Myanmar

Myanmar residents awoke Sunday to devastation after tropical cyclone Nargis tore through city streets, battered buildings, sank boats and caused unknown casualties. The cyclone has also ripped down power and phone lines, cutting off the military-run nation just a week before a crucial referendum on its new constitution, the first polling in Myanmar since general elections in 1990.

The main city of Yangon was hard hit, with traffic lights, billboards and street lamps littering the streets after being blown over by the strong winds that swept through on Saturday. Electricity supplies and telecommunications in Yangon have been cut since late Friday night as the storm bore down from the Bay of Bengal, packing winds of 190-240Km/hr.

Nargis made landfall around the mouth of the Ayeyawaddy (Irrawaddy) river, about 220Km southwest of Yangon, before hitting the country's economic hub of Yangon. It was not immediately known whether damage from the storm would affect the referendum next Saturday on a new constitution which the ruling government says will pave the way for democratic elections in 2010.

Thailand's meteorological department on Sunday downgraded Nargis to a depression, but warned of flash floods and heavy rains. NASA pictures taken on Monday showed the entire coastal plain under water, with fallow agricultural areas of the delta - the country's main rice-growing region - particularly hard hit by flooding.

Rice fields littered with corpses, desperate survivors homeless and with nothing to eat or drink -- witnesses paint a horrifying picture of Myanmar's remote typhoon-devastated south. More than 22,000 people have been killed in the disaster, which ravaged a huge swathe of southwestern Myanmar, affecting 24 million people or nearly half the country's population.