Cox’s Bazar has been battered by cyclones for three years running, having already suffered astonishing devastation in the past. Allen, head of the UNHCR refugee agency’s operations in Cox’s Bazar, told AFP.“What else can we do? If Allah does not protect us, we will die,” said 60-year-old refugee Dil Mohammad.The Rohingya are no strangers to the monsoon, he said.Aid groups say a cyclone or devastating storm could cut access to the camps for a week -- restricting food and supplies to a tent city with a population greater than San Francisco.

Cox China Box type injection mold Factory Bazar (Bangladesh): Marooned on a dusty slope in the world’s largest refugee camp, Osiur Rahman looked to the hill where a Rohingya girl was buried in a landslide just days earlier and contemplated his chances should the earth give way beneath his feet.A massive operation to shore up the camps against disaster is in overdrive, with bulldozers levelling hills and refugees bunkering down however they can.“Everybody is afraid, wondering where we’ll go if our houses are destroyed,” Rohingya imam Muhammad Yusuf told AFP. There are children everywhere around here.Mosques and community centres could shelter 150,000 people if needed, said Kazi Abdur Rahman, acting district administrator of Cox’s Bazar. Toilets are being fortified with sandbags to prevent a major disease outbreak should floodwater meet overflowing latrines..But there are limits to how much can be done.The World Food Programme’s emergency coordinator Peter Guest said thousands of porters were being assembled to carry food on foot if access roads were cut.There is a dearth of safe land to relocate the estimated 200,000 refugees in direct danger of floods and landslides, and just 21,000 have been moved so far.Bangladesh has restricted the use of sturdier materials for shelters because it may suggest the Rohingya plan to stay, contrary to Dhaka’s desire to return them to Myanmar.The first storms underscored the fragility of the camps: the brief rains turned roads into quagmires, crumbled hillsides and flooded low-lying areas.Those left homeless or starving will have nowhere to run anyway: the Rohingya are encircled by military checkpoints and prohibited from leaving. It is not possible to shift one million people,” he told AFP.“They could face yet again another emergency, this time driven by mother nature.Bangladesh has freed up hundreds of hectares (acres) but most is hilly and was prone to landslides even before the Rohingya uprooted trees for shelters and firewood.” The camps’ makeshift homes are predicted to receive more than 2.“Our families would be killed.For the 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled to southeast Bangladesh in the past nine months, the approaching monsoon season poses the most serious threat since they were violently expelled from Myanmar.5 metres of rainfall over three months starting June -- roughly triple what Britain gets in a year. But as the rains approach, the young girl’s death this month in a torrent of mud and rock has heightened fears of a much greater tragedy. We constantly fear that rain could trigger a landslide,” the 53-year-old told # AFP on the steep embankment where he lives with nine family members in a bamboo shack.The Rohingya, who have fled persecution time and again, fear being on the run once more.The roof was blown clean off Noor Mohammad’s shack in a recent squall.Cyclones have killed tens of thousands along the Bangladesh coast in recent decades and countless more have been swept to their deaths in floods and landslides.“Here, there is nothing to stop the wind,” he said, gesturing to the deforested hills stretching for miles.Close to one million of the stateless Muslim minority live in the Cox’s Bazar district but the new arrivals, stranded on unstable hills in bamboo and plastic shacks, are especially vulnerable.

“But if there is a big cyclone, and all these people need relocating, there is not a system for that yet.“We could literally have lives lost as people slide down hillsides and valleys are flooded with water,” Kevin J.The huge endeavour to prevent disaster has seen slopes vulnerable to collapse flattened and extensive canal systems carved throughout the camps. But in Myanmar, villages were built to withstand its ferocity and trees provided a bulwark against the elements. He had gathered chunks of wood and rocks to weigh it down but was “scared of what could pass” when Bangladesh’s wild weather barrels through.This time, nature is on a collision course with refugees who have nowhere to run -- no higher ground and no cyclone shelters.