Blackouts and shortages plague Yangon after storm

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Blackouts, water shortages, soaring food and fuel prices and despair gripped Myanmar's biggest city of Yangon three days after a cyclone ripped across the Irrawaddy delta, killing thousands of people.

"The lights went out, we have no water," said a local trader, washing in a lake in the former capital of five million people. "The storm destroyed so much, I have to take a bath here."

Myanmar state television said close to 4,000 people were killed and nearly 3,000 missing in only two of the five areas declared disaster zones, a sharp increase from just hundreds of casualties reported earlier in the day.

As city residents surveyed the uprooted trees, severed telephone cables and mangled billboards on the streets, there was also anger at the military government, which has ruled the former Burma since 1962.

"Last time, they came here, just like ants, from where I don't know," said one man, comparing the reaction of security forces when they cracked down last September on Buddhist monk-led protests against the military junta.

"Now I can't see any -- no army, no police."

Residents said the price of petrol has tripled since Friday, rising to $10 a litre. Queues of up to a kilometre long formed at filling stations and customers were limited to two litres each.

People carrying buckets and bottles lined up at artesian wells, others patched up damaged roofs with plastic sheets.