India pulled off its biggest-ever disaster relief operation, successfully evacuating nearly a million people out of harm’s way before Cyclone Phailin struck Odisha and Andhra Pradesh but heavy rains and winds ravaged farmland and property in the two coastal states.
At least 17 people were killed, Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, chief of relief operations for Odisha, told Bloomberg in a phone call. Phailin, Thai for sapphire, struck the state with wind speeds up to 210 kmph on Saturday near Gopalpur about 600 kilometers southwest of Kolkata, and will weaken gradually into a deep depression by late Sunday, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said. Odisha chief Minister Naveen Patnaik called recovery from the storm a challenge.
Television images showed power and telephone-line poles knocked out by the storm, and billboards and roofs ripped off shops and houses. Roads were flooded and trees were uprooted by the raging winds. A cargo ship, MV Bingo, is believed to have sunk in the rough seas caused by Phailin with its crew last sighted on a lifeboat Saturday, the Press Trust of India reported.
Phailin is the strongest storm to hit India since a cyclone with maximum wind speeds of 260 kilometers per hour lashed Odisha in 1999, killing about 9,000 people, damaging 2 million houses and destroying crops spread over 1.65 million hectares.
Odisha state may lose 1 million tonnes of rice output due to the cyclone and heavy downpour, according to Trilochan Mohapatra, director of the state-run Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, Odisha.
About 500,000 to 600,000 hectares of land with rice crops have been affected in the state, he said in a phone interview with Bloomberg on Sunday, adding that winter-sown crop may also be affected because of sea-water inundation following the cyclone.
India is the world’s largest rice exporter. About 10% is produced in Odisha, where most of the crop is maturing or ready for harvest and the storm might result in a loss of 2% of India’s rice, David Streit, a senior forecaster for Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland said on Saturday.
There’s not much damage to the rice crops in Andhra Pradesh as of now, Mohapatra said.
This morning the weather is clear, said Ekbote Vinod Kumar, assistant commissioner at the disaster management department of the Andhra Pradesh government. Relief work was underway as teams of revenue department officials and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel fanned out to rescue people and assess damage, Kumar said over the phone.
But a formidable challenge remained in the form of impending floods, Odisha’s disaster management minister S.N. Patra said in a telephone interview.
In Odisha alone, 873,000 people were transported to the safety of inland buildings that could withstand the ferocious cyclonic winds. Some 129,000 people were evacuated in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. The previous biggest evacuation was in 1990, when an estimated 650,000 people were moved in Andhra Pradesh for a cyclone, AFP reported quoting the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).
A report by the London-based think tank, the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), praised Indian authorities for learning the lessons of previous disasters.
Credit is due to those who have been involved in efforts to reduce the scale of vulnerability to disasters across India. The low loss of life, following the strongest storm ever measured in the Bay of Bengal, would almost certainly not have been possible without learning lessons from previous cyclones and tsunamis that have hit this coastline, said ODI head of climate change Tom Mitchell.
But, he warned: This is about livelihoods as well as lives. Over the two decades many parts of Indiaincluding Andhra Pradeshwill be increasingly exposed to disasters. The focus on how deadly disasters can be should not obscure the fact that many homes, hospitals, shops and schools will have been badly impacted in ways which will drive people into poverty.
In Andhra Pradesh, people were evacuated from the low-lying areas of Srikakulam, Vizianagaram and Visakhapatnam districts, highly vulnerable to Cyclone Phailin, the most powerful storm to hit India since the 1999 Odisha cyclone.
Nearly half the Andhra Pradesh evacuees were in Srikakulam district, which has a 195km long coastline and borders the badly-hit Ganjam district of Odisha. Around 47,000 people were rescued from Ichapuram in Srikakulam, battered by torrential rains. Normal life was affected in north coastal Andhra as heavy rains and gales with windspeeds of up to 185-190kmph hit the region.
Around 11 mandals (local administrative units) in Srikakulam were the worst hit, the government said, as power and communication lines went down across the district on Saturday. Transport services to the region were hit as most flights operating out of Bhubaneswar and Visakhapatnam were cancelled and several trains were either rerouted or cancelled.
The movement of vehicles on National Highway-5 that passes through Ganjam and Srikakulam districts too came to a halt.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy held his second review meeting late on Saturday evening with top state and coastal district officials to monitor the situation. Reddy said he directed the officials to be prepared to meet any eventuality. Control rooms had been set up in the districts to direct rescue and evacuation.
The state government took all preventive actions, to avoid any loss of human life, Reddy earlier said. The state government said it has no reports of any casualties.
Around 2,300 personnel of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) were pressed into action to help the state governments of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh oversee evacuation, said Marri Shashidhar Reddy, vice-chairman of NDMA and a legislator from Andhra Pradesh.
This is the biggest deployment ever, Shashidhar Reddy said.Shashidhar Reddy said around 500,000 tonnes of food had been kept ready to feed the affected people.
The sea pushed as much as 40 metres inland in parts of Srikakulam and Vizianagaram districts, said N. Raghuveera Reddy, revenue minister of Andhra Pradesh, who oversaw rescue arrangements from Visakhapatnam.
In Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar, Subhash Salunke, director of the Indian Institute of Public Health, said The biggest concern is the availability of potable water. We are looking at improving laboratory testing near water bodies to ensure additional outbreaks of vector- borne diseases can be controlled. The government has been fully prepared and loss to manpower is minimal. Our job is now to reach isolated villages and ensure health systems are in place.
NDMA said extensive damage to mud houses was expected in Odisha, in addition to partial disruption of power and communication lines, disruption of rail and road traffic, potential threat from flying debris, flooding of escape routes [and] extensive damage to agricultural crops.
Meanwhile, the country is trying to cope with a sharp drop in electricity demand and its impact on the grid due to the cyclone. The load has dropped to 90,000MW from around 127,000MW, according to top officials managing the country’s electricity grid.
The electricity demand in the Eastern region including Odisha has come down from 16,000MW to 6,500MW. The eastern grid supplies electricity to Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Sikkim and West Bengal. With the distribution network being switched off, the demand in Odisha has come down, leaving large parts of the state without electricity.
There are three reasons for this sharp fall in demand. The factories are closed on account of Dussehra; it is a weekend and then the weather systems brought in due to the cyclone, said a top government official overseeing the grid requesting anonymity.
This dip in demand has strained the national grid network, with thermal power stations being taken off-line to stabilize the grid.
We are awaiting for the load to pick up in the region, said the official quoted above.
Odisha has an installed power generation capacity of 4682.10MW, including the state’s share in the central and joint projects. The state had electricity demand of 3,448MW in August during peak consumption hoursnormally between 8am and 11am, and 6.30pm and 10pm.
Officials say that the worst is behind them with the grid being out of danger.
2012 HT Media