Freak dust storms kill 117 Lightning strikes Andhra 77,774 times in 8 days
DESTRUCTION Western UP, eastern Rajasthan worst hit; MP and Punjab affected too
AGRA/JAIPUR/DEHRADUN/BHOPAL: A chain of powerful thunderstorms, a freak pre-monsoon phenomenon that experts blamed on a confluence of three weather factors, pounded parts of north and north-west I ndia overnight Wednesday, killing at least 117 people and leaving a trail of destruction in at least six states.
Hundreds more were injured in the storms that packed windspeeds of up to 130 km per hour, and wrecked mud houses, damaged crops, uprooted trees and electricity pylons, cutting off power supplies and disrupting train traffic in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana.
Western Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring eastern Rajasthan bore the brunt of the storms; 111 people died in the two states, most of them from house collapses.
A cyclonic circulation, induced by a western atmospheric disturbance, high moisture levels brought by easterly winds and a recent spell of unusually high temperatures that soared to 45 degrees Celsius were responsible for the thunderstorms, Kuldeep Srivastava, a senior official at the India Meteorological Department (IMD), said.
The result was a squall line or a chain of thunderstorm clouds that emerged on Wednesday afternoon from north Rajasthan to eastern Uttar Pradesh, passing over Delhi as well.
“It can be called a freak incident,” Mahesh Palawat, chief meteorologist at Skymet Weather, a private forecaster, said. “Dust storms are usually not this intense, nor do these systems cover such a large area.”
Of the 75 deaths in UP, 46 were reported from the Agra division. Deaths were also reported from districts such as Kanpur, Hamirpur, Bijnore and Meerut as the storms cut a wide swathe starting at 7 pm on Wednesday.
In Rajasthan, 36 deaths were reported, most of them in Bharatpur, a district neighbouring Agra. In northern Madhya Pradesh’s Bhind region, two children died and more than a dozen people were injured. In Uttarakhand, a hailstorm killed two in the Kumaon division. In Punjab’s Patiala, two people were killed in a thunderstorm.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi directed central officials to coordinate with states in ensuring speedy relief and rehabilitation efforts. “Saddened by the loss of lives due to dust storms in various parts of India,” he tweeted.
Uttar Pradesh chief secretary, Rajive Kumar, said the commissioners of Agra and other divi- sions have been directed to distribute relief supplies and compensation to victims.
Rajasthan chief minister, Vasundhare Raje, instructed her cabinet colleagues to take charge of the relief work in affected districts. “An unfortunate incident, we have been working closely with local authorities to mitigate the situation,” Raje tweeted.
Although no deaths were reported, normal life was also hit in many places in Punjab and Haryana on Wednesday after a high-velocity dust storm swept the states.a vast quantity of freshy harvested wheat was drenched by heavy rain in many parts of the two states. HYDERABAD: They say lighting never strikes twice in the same place, but according to the weatherman, coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh, which have witnessed 77,774 lightning strikes over the past eight days because of freak weather conditions, including 41,025 in a span of 16 hours on Tuesday, could see even more lightning strikes in the days ahead.
Tuesday’s strikes resulted in the deaths of 16 people. On April 26, 36,749 lighting incidents were reported causing nine deaths.
“These are just cloud-toground lightning strikes. If you take into consideration cloud-tocloud or in-cloud lightning, the number of strikes would be in several lakhs,” says meteorologist T Thandava Krishna, a project manager in the Andhra Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority.
While lightning strikes are not uncommon in this part of India, and in these summer months, their high number is being attributed by experts to weather conditions that facilitated the formation of a monster 12-km-long cumulonimbus cloud.
Thunderstorms, flash floods and heatwaves are likely to increase in future and their intensity will be more visible in northern India
VENKATESH DUTTA, Environmental science expert on climate change
Freak weather due to high temperature, unstable atmosphere.