DHAKA, Bangladesh - The official death toll from a savage cyclone that wreaked havoc on southwest Bangladesh reached 1,723 Saturday -- the deadliest storm to hit the country in a decade.
Military helicopters and ships joined rescue and relief operations and aid workers on the ground struggled to reach victims. Tropical Cyclone Sidr tore apart villages, severely disrupted power lines and forced more than a million coastal villagers to evacuate to government shelters.

The latest death figure tallied to 1,723, with 474 deaths reported from worst-hit Barguna district and 385 from neighboring Patuakhali, a military spokesman, Lt. Col. Moyeenullah Chowdhury, told reporters in the capital, Dhaka.

Tropical Cyclone Sidr - the deadliest storm to hit the impoverished South Asian country in more than a decade - tore apart villages, severely disrupted power lines and forced more than a million coastal villagers to evacuate to government shelters.

Rescuers - some relying on the brute force of elephants - battled along roads that were washed out or blocked by debris to try delivering water and food to those stranded by flooding.

"The toll is rising fast, as we receive more information from outlying areas where telephone lines have been restored," said Mokhlesur Rahman, a Ministry of Disaster Management official in Dhaka, the capital.

Of the evacuees who managed to return home Saturday, many found their straw and bamboo huts flattened. Some sought refuge with neighbors living in brick houses that withstood the storm, which struck with 150 mph winds on Thursday.

"We survived, but what we need now is help to rebuild our homes," Chand Miah, a resident of Maran Char, a small island in Khulna district, said.

The army sent helicopters to take supplies to the most remote areas, while navy ships delivered items and dispensed medical assistance to migrant fishing communities on and around hundreds of tiny islands, or shoals, along the coast, the Inter Services Public Relations department said.

The damage to livelihood, housing and crops will be "extremely severe," John Holmes, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said Friday, adding that the world body was making millions of dollars in aid available to Bangladesh.

The full picture of the death and destruction remained unclear due to communication and power problems. But Holmes said his U.N. agency believed more than 20,000 houses were damaged in the hardest-hit districts, and that the death toll was expected to climb beyond the government figures.

About 150 fishing trawlers were unaccounted for, he said.

Many parts of Dhaka, the biggest city in this poor, desperatelycrowded nation of 150 million people, remained without power or water Saturday. The storm killed at least four people in the capital, which was pounded by strong winds and driving rain Friday.

Hasanul Amin, assistant director of the official cyclone preparedness program of the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, said about a dozen teams had been deployed to the worst-hit areas in the country's southwest.

Several international humanitarian organizations, such as UNICEF and CARE, were working alongside government and local volunteer agencies to provide safe drinking water and emergency supplies in the affected areas.

"We are hopeful that emergency preparedness in place and quick action has successfully reduced the loss of human life," Suman Islam of CARE Bangladesh said in an e-mailed statement.

But the dispatching of supplies has proved slow going. In the village of Sharankhola, some people waited for hours to get dry biscuits and rice, according to Bishnu Prasad, a United News of Bangladesh reporter on the scene.

"We have lost everything," a farmer, Moshararf Hossain, told Prasad. "We have nowhere to go."

Sidr spawned a 4-foot-high storm surge that swept through low-lying areas and some offshore islands, leaving them under water, said Nahid Sultana, an official of the Ministry of Food and Disaster Management.

At least 1.5 million coastal villagers had fled to shelters where they were given emergency rations, said senior government official Ali Imam Majumder in Dhaka.

Bangladesh is prone to cyclones and floods that cause huge losses of life and property. The most recent deadly storm was a tornado that leveled 80 villages in northern Bangladesh in 1996, killing 621 people.