Millions flee towards shelters as Cyclone Amphan slams ashore
A powerful cyclone has slammed ashore along the coastline of India and Bangladesh, where more than 2.6 million people fled to shelters in a frantic evacuation made all the more challenging by the coronavirus pandemic.
Cyclone Amphan, the equivalent of a category three hurricane, was packing winds of up to 105mph and maximum gusts of 118mph. Authorities warned it could cause extensive damage to flimsy houses and a storm surge could push seawater 15 miles inland, flooding cities including Kolkata.
Coconut trees swayed wildly, electric poles lay scattered on the roads of Kolkata, rain pounded fishing villages and rivers surged as the storm battered the coast.
The densely populated region has some of the most vulnerable communities in South Asia – poor fishing communities in the Sunderbans
and more than a million Rohingya refugees living in crowded camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.
“This is quite a double whammy,” said T Sundaramanan, a health systems consultant in Pondicherry in south-east India. “This pandemic is a new spin on it.” He said the cyclone could have devastating consequences for India’s fight against the pandemic, possibly causing it to spread to more remote communities.
“Our responses will be crippled,” he said. “Our supply lines will be threatened. How will we move in relief supplies over land if all of it is in lockdown?”
The cyclone made landfall between Digha, a seaside resort in West Bengal, and the Hatiya Islands in Bangladesh. The eye of the storm was likely to pass through the Sunderbans, one of the largest mangrove forests in the world, India’s meteorological department said.
The forests could act as a vital line of defence by dissipating some of the energy from the waves that would otherwise crash into the coastline, said KJ Ramesh, the department’s former chief.
Bangladesh is attempting to evacuate 2.2 million people to safety. India’s West Bengal state moved nearly 300,000 and Odisha state another 148,486. In refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, where the first ten coronavirus cases were confirmed last week, authorities and UN workers prepared 50 shelters and assigned 256 volunteer units.
Areas at risk of landslides were stabilised with bamboo and concrete walls. But the combination of the virus and cyclone could lead to a “new humanitarian crisis”, said Manuel Pereira, deputy chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration in Bangladesh.
“We know that if people are forced to seek communal shelter, they’ll be unable to maintain physical distancing,” he said.