1 lakh evacuated as Nisarga lands
MUMBAI: Several trees were uprooted, electricity lines brought down leaving thousands without power and houses flattened in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, close to Alibaug, where cyclone Nisarga made landfall on Wednesday.
Officials said 85 large trees, some of which fell over houses, and 11 electric poles were ripped out as the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) said its team will assess the damage once t he i nt e ns i t y o f t he wind decreases.
There was no report of any casualty so far, officials said.
Some 100,000 people were evacuated from low-lying areas in Maharashtra and neighbouring Gujarat, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. Both states, already among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, activated disaster response teams, fearing extensive flooding could further impair overwhelmed health systems.
“A total of 43 NDRF teams have been deployed in the wake of the cyclone, including 21 in Maharashtra and 16 in Gujarat. We have evacuated around 40,000 people each from both the states, along with several from Daman and Diu. Nearly one lakh people have been evacuated so far,” SN Pradhan, NDRF Director-general told news agency ANI.
“If hospitals and clinics are damaged by the cyclone, the city won’t be able to cope with the large number of COVID-19 cases, and social distancing measures will become virtually impossible to follow,” news agency AP quoted Bidisha Pillai, chief executive of Save the Children in India, as saying in a statement.
Some 200 COVID-19 patients in Mumbai were moved from a field hospital built beneath a tent to another facility to avoid the risk of cyclone, the officials said.
SN Pradhan, director of India’s National Disaster Response Force, said that evacuations were nearly complete and that social distancing norms were being followed in cyclone shelters.
“Let us fight this danger like we are standing up to the corona pandemic and are on our way to defeat it. Likewise, we will prevail over this situation too!” chief minister Uddhav Balasheb Thackeray tweeted.
The cyclone also threatened to worsen prospects for an economic turnaround as a 9-weeklong lockdown began to ease this week. India has reported more than 200,000 cases and 5,800 deaths due to the virus .