At least 22 are dead and roughly one-thousand-500 fishermen are missing after a tropical storm slammed the southern coast of Bangladesh on Tuesday.

Local police say the storm swept six coastal regions including Bhola, Hatiya and Sandwip Islands, destroying around one-thousand-500 houses.

The recent tropical storm was one of the strongest in decades. Most of the missing fishermen are assumed to have evacuated to remote islands on the Bay of Bengal or in the neighboring Sundarbans.