One morning in June, Shirin Sultana rose to say her prayers and found her kitchen floor covered in knee-deep water. It was the start of a massive flash flood that inundated vast regions of Bangladesh's northeast, killing at least 102 people.
"I could not have imagined that the floodwater could rush in and rise a few feet in a matter of minutes," Sultana, 45, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Flash floods are common in this part of Bangladesh, along the Indian border, so residents did not worry much when a series of floods hit the area in April and May, said Masuk ur Rahman, senior manager at Padakhep, an NGO working on rural development.