Bangladesh, India brace for wind, flooding as fearsome cyclone nears

NEW DELHI — A crushing cyclone barreled up the Bay of Bengal on Tuesday, heading for a swampy stretch along the border of India and Bangladesh, and threatening to un- leash 165 mph winds and floods when it makes landfall today.

As the cyclone, Amphan — categorized by Indian meteorologists as equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane — neared the coastal areas, hundreds of thousands of people in India and Bangladesh were bracing for it and had started moving toward emergency shelters.

In the eastern Indian state of Odisha, authorities have fewer shelters to work with because many have been turned into covid-19 quarantine centers. Indian officials are now struggling to evacuate people and prepare for floods and destruction while still under a partial lockdown. Humanitarian officials are worried that by packing people into shelters, coronavirus infections could spread even further.

Some of the emergency cyclone shelters were being filled to only 50% capacity to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

The storm is now predicted to pass over Kolkata, one of India’s biggest cities, which is full of historic buildings.

Satya Narayan Pradhan, chief of India’s National Disaster Response Force, said the incoming storm could “wreak havoc.”

“We must take it very seriously,” he said. Indian officials said the storm was one of the most dangerous super cyclones to hit India in decades, since a cyclone in 1999 killed more than 9,000 people. That storm packed winds of more than 170 mph, devastating many states along India’s coast.

Since then, authorities in India and Bangladesh have significantly improved their emergency response measures, drafting evacuation plans and building thousands of sturdy emergency shelters, some of which can accommodate several thousand people each.

In Bangladesh, officials said the storm could unleash slashing rains on the muddy, wooden shacks of about 1 million Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar. Those refugees fled ethnically driven massacres in Burma in 2017 and have been rendered stateless, stuck in limbo in squalid camps in Bangladesh that have been flooded time and again.

Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that military authorities adopted in 1989. Some nations, such as the United States and Britain, have refused to adopt the name change.

Many people in Bangladesh, apparently, are not heeding the calls to evacuate and move into emergency shelters, despite being told about the risks.

“There is a sense fear among people,” said Selim Shahrier, a station manager at a community radio station in southwestern Bangladesh. “They hesitate to leave their belongings.”

In eastern India on Tuesday, emergency crews dressed in orange jumpsuits prowled coastal areas, blaring messages from megaphones that urged people to move into shelters as soon as possible.

Indian officials also sent fleets of buses to scoop up vulnerable people and take them to the shelters, which are stocked with water and food.