520,000 in India flee cyclone big as France
BEHRAMPUR, India — A powerful cyclone packing heavy rains and destructive winds hammered eastern India today as hundreds of thousands of residents moved inland to escape the dangerous storm. Reports of deaths and the extent of damage from Cyclone Phailin won’t become clear until after daybreak.
The storm, which made landfall early Saturday night near the town of Golpalpur in Orissa state, was expected to cause large-scale power and communications failures and shut down road and rail links, officials said. It’s also expected to cause extensive damage to crops.
By midafternoon Saturday, wind gusts were so strong that they could blow over grown men. Seawater pushed inland, swamping villages where many people survive as subsistence farmers in mud and thatch huts.
As the cyclone swept across the Bay of Bengal
Villagers near
toward the Indian coast, satellite images showed its spinning tails covering an area larger than France. With some of the world’s warmest waters, the Indian Ocean is considered a cyclone hot spot, and some of the deadliest storms in recent history have come through the Bay of Bengal, including a 1999 cyclone that also hit Orissa and killed 10,000, damaged 2 million houses and destroyed crops spread over 4 million acres.
India is the world’s largest rice exporter. About 10 percent is produced in Orissa, where up to a fifth of the crop may be damaged by winds and heavy rain, said David Streit, a senior forecaster for Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Md. Most of the crop is maturing or ready for harvest, and the storm might result in a loss of 2 percent of India’s rice, he said.
“Heavy downpour with heavy wind may cause extensive damage to the crop,” said Trilochan Mohapatra, director of the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack, Orissa. “Most of the standing crop was going to be harvested in the next 15 or 20 days.”
In Behrampur, a town about 7 miles inland from where the eye of the storm hit, the sky blackened quickly around the time of landfall, with heavy winds and rains pelting the empty streets.
Windowpanes shook and shattered against the wind. Outside, objects could be heard smashing into walls.
“My parents have been calling me regularly … they are worried,” said Hemant Pati, 27, who was holed up in a Behrampur hotel with 15 other people from the coastal town hit first by the storm.
The hotel manager said he would bar the doors against anyone trying to enter, saying there would be food, water and electricity from generators only for guests of the Hotel Jyoti Residency. “Nobody can come inside, and nobody can go out,” Shaik Nisaruddin said.
Estimates of the storm’s power had dropped slightly, with the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center in Hawaii showing maximum sustained winds of about 138 miles per hour, with gusts up to 167 mph.
The storm, though, remained exceedingly strong and dangerous. A few hours before it hit land, the eye of the storm collapsed, spreading the hurricane-force winds out over a larger area and giving it a “bigger damage footprint,” said Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the U.S.-based private Weather Underground.
“It’s probably a bad thing it was doing this when it made landfall. Much of the housing in India is unable to withstand even a much weaker hurricane,” Masters said.
He also said the coast would not be alone in suffering heavy damage. “This is a remarkably strong storm. It’s going to carry hurricane-force winds inland for about 12 hours, which is quite unusual,” Masters said.
Typhoons and hurricanes typically lose much of their force when they hit land, where there is less heat-trapping moisture feeding energy into the storm.
By Friday evening, some 420,000 people had been moved to higher ground or shelters in Orissa, and 100,000 more in neighboring Andhra Pradesh, said Indian Home Secretary Anil Goswami.
L.S. Rathore, the head of the Indian Meteorological Department, predicted a storm surge of 10-11.5 feet, but several U.S. experts had predicted a much higher wall of water would blast ashore. Meteorologist Ryan Maue of the private U.S. weather firm Weather Bell said that, even in the bestcase scenario, there would be a surge of 20-30 feet.
A storm surge is the big killer in such storms, though heavy rains are likely to compound the destruction. The Indian government said some 12 million people would be affected by the storm, including millions living far from the coast.
There were few reports coming out of Orissa in the first hours after the storm’s landfall.
Phailin, Thai for “sapphire,” had already been large and powerful for nearly 36 hours, with winds that had built up a tremendous amount of surge, Maue said. “A storm this large can’t peter out that fast,” he said.
The 1999 cyclone — similar in strength to Phailin but covering a smaller area — threw out a 19.4-foot storm surge.
Pentayya Chintakayala, 33, a fisherman from a village near the port city of Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, said the fishermen of his village had stopped fishing and moved their boats inland, but they were concerned that they could lose everything if the storm was as severe as predicted.
“What they tell us on television and what we see in the waves have nothing to do with each other,” he said. “Fishermen don’t always listen to the warnings, and 90 percent of the time that’s OK, but 10 percent of the time the warnings are true, and we lose everything because we don’t believe them. Fishermen are stubborn like that.”
In Bhubaneshwar, the Orissa state capital, government workers and volunteers were putting together hundreds of thousands of food packages for relief camps.
Stranded tourists who had come for Orissa’s beaches and temples instead roamed the hallways of boarded-up hotels.
“It seemed strange, because it was a beautiful sunny day yesterday,” said Doris Lang of Honolulu, who was with a friend in the seaside temple town of Puri when news of the storm’s approach reached them.
Surya Narayan Patro, the state’s top disaster management official, had said that “no one will be allowed to stay in mud and thatched houses in the coastal areas” when the storm hits.
By Saturday afternoon, the sea had already pushed inland as much as 130 feet along parts of the coastline.
Officials in both Orissa and Andhra Pradesh have been stockpiling emergency food supplies and setting up shelters. The Indian military has put some of its forces on alert, and has trucks, transport planes and helicopters at the ready for relief operations.
The storm is expected to cause large-scale power and communications failures and shut down road and rail links, officials said.
In the port city of Paradip — which was hammered in the October 1999 cyclone — at least seven ships moved out to sea to ride out the storm, with other boats shifted to safer parts of the harbor, officials said.
U.S. forecasters had repeatedly warned that Phailin would be immense.
“If it’s not a record, it’s really, really close,” University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy told The Associated Press. “You really don’t get storms stronger than this anywhere in the world ever.”
To compare it to killer U.S. storms, McNoldy said Phailin is nearly the size of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, but also has the wind power of 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that packed 165 mph winds at landfall in Miami.
India experiences two cyclone seasons a year, one in May before the annual monsoon rains and another that began this month.
Greenpeace India said it shares the concern of the victims of the cyclone, but added that average global temperatures would continue to rise, causing more intense tropical storms in some regions unless greenhouse-gas emissions and global warming are addressed. “The climate change ball is rolling and people will suffer the consequences,” said Biswajit Mohanty, a Greenpeace India Board member, in a statement.
Also Saturday, a typhoon that flooded villages and farms in the Philippines’ major rice-growing region has killed at least 13 people, officials said.
Power failures affected Aurora province, where Typhoon Nari made landfall late Friday, and five nearby provinces due to downed pylons and emergency shutdowns that were intended to prevent accidents.
Nari slammed into the coast with 94 mph winds and gusts up to 116 mph. Weather forecaster Meno Mendoza said Nari weakened after hitting the mountains in Aurora then quickly blew across the rice-growing central plains of Luzon.
More than 2,500 people were evacuated from coastal villages before the typhoon struck, said provincial disaster officer Amado Elson Egargue.
Nueva Ecija Gov. Aurelio Umali told a local radio station that the initial estimate was that 37,050 acres of rice may have been damaged or destroyed.
Nari had moved over the South China Sea around noon Saturday and was moving west toward Vietnam. Information for this article was contributed by Shonal Ganguly, Kay Johnson, Katy Daigle and Oliver Teves of The Associated Press; and by Adi Narayan, Bibhudatta Pradhan, Brian K. Sullivan, Rajesh Kumar Singh, Andrew MacAskill, Karthikeyan Sundaram, Pratik Parija,Abhishek Shanker, Daniel Ten Kate, Jeff Wilson and Marvin G. Perez of Bloomberg News; and by Gardiner Harris, Malavika Vyawahare, Hari Kumar and Vivekananda Nemana of The NewYorkTimes; and by Mark Magnier of the Los
AngelesTimes.