Thousands of people have been evacuated to monasteries, pagodas and schools in Myanmar, seeking shelter from a powerful storm that tore the roofs off buildings and killed at least three people. Cyclone Mocha made landfall near Sittwe township in Rakhine state on Sunday with wind speeds of up to 130 mph (209 km/h), the country’s meteorological department said. Myanmar’s military information office said the storm had damaged homes, electricity infrastructure, mobile phone masts, boats and lampposts in Sittwe, Kyaukpyu, and Gwa townships. It said the storm also tore roofs off sports facilities on the Coco Islands, about 260 miles south-west of the country’s largest city, Yangon. Rakhine-based media reported that streets and the basements of houses in Sittwe’s low-lying areas had been flooded. Much of the area is cut off from phone and internet services. More than 4,000 of Sittwe’s 300,000 residents were evacuated to other cities, and more than 20,000 people were sheltering in monasteries, pagodas and schools on higher ground in the city, said Tin Nyein Oo, who is volunteering in Sittwe’s shelters. Lin Lin, the head of a local charity, said earlier that there was not enough food in the shelters after more people than expected arrived. Several deaths were reported as a result of the storm. A rescue team from eastern Shan state announced on its Facebook page that it had recovered the bodies of a couple buried when a landslide hit their house in Tachileik township. Local media reported that a man was crushed to death when a tree fell on him in Pyin Oo Lwin township in central Mandalay region. Authorities in the Bangladeshi city of Cox’s Bazar, which lies in the storm’s predicted path, said they had evacuated about 1.27 million people. By early afternoon, however, it appeared the storm would mostly miss the country as it veered east, according to Azizur Rahman, the director of the country’s meteorological department. “The level of risk has reduced to a great extent in Bangladesh,” he told reporters. UN agencies and aid workers in Bangladesh had positioned tons of dry food and dozens of ambulances with mobile medical teams in refugee camps that house more than a million Rohingya people who fled persecution in Myanmar. In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar with a storm surge that devastated populated areas around the Irrawaddy River delta. At least 138,000 people died and tens of thousands of homes and other buildings were washed away.