Cyclone Amphan batters India, Bangladesh; claims 88 lives
India and Bangladesh began a massive cleanup on Thursday after the fiercest cyclone since 1999 killed 88 people, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
kolkata — “Never in my life have I seen a cyclone like this in Bengal,” said 95-year-old Ashok Roy, a retired school teacher, visibly shaken by the ferocity of the extremely severe cyclone ‘Amphan’ that left a trail of destruction in half a dozen districts, including the state capital.
Buses and taxis crashed against each other, small fishing boats turned turtle and grounded planes shook at the inundated Kolkata airport as winds of up to 190kmph rampaged through West Bengal, already reeling under the coronavirus outbreak and the lockdown caused by it.
On Thursday morning, 45-year-old Jamal Mondal along with his four daughters and wife was jostling outside a relief camp in South 24 Parganas district’s Gosaba for two loaves of bread and a tarpaulin sheet to spend the nights at a cyclone shelter.
The migrant worker had returned home from Bengaluru on Monday. But that relief was short-lived. His one-storey mud house was washed away by Amphan on Wednesday night. “On Monday, when I reached home, I thought my sufferings were
over. But I was wrong. The lockdown took away my job and the cyclone took away everything that was left. I do not know what would I do next, where would I stay and how would I feed my family,” Mondal told a TV news channel.
“It is not the city where I have grown up... it seems to be a destroyed one. It seems there was a war yesterday... I cannot believe that this is my Kolkata,” said Sudhir Chakraborty, a resident of south Kolkata’s Rashbehari area.
“The entire city has been devastated. Around 4,000 trees have uprooted in Kolkata. We are short of staff due to the lockdown. It will take some time to restore normalcy,” Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim said. More than 1.4 million people in the city are living without electricity since Thursday night.
Reports from North and South 24 Parganas, and East Midnapore stated that roofs of numerous thatched houses have been blown away. —