A cyclone hit East India on Friday, bringing down trees and power lines and “extensively” damaging the tourist town of Puri, but there were no early reports of a million people evacuated before it landed.
Tropical Cyclone Fani spent days building power in the northern reaches of the Bay of Bengal before it struck the coast of Odisha state at around 8 a.m., the State-run Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
Howling winds of up to 200 km / h whipsawed trees, rooting scores, and driving rain impacted visibility, while streets were deserted in Bhubaneswar and Puri, the state capital.
“Damage in Puri is extensive, power supply, disrupted telephone lines,” Odisha’s Special Relief Commissioner, Bishnupada Sethi, told Reuters, referring to the Hindu seaside temple town that is popular with pilgrims and was directly on the path of the storm.
“There has been no reported causality so far,” he said.
Cyclone tracker Tropical Storm Risk placed Fani on a scale of one to five as a powerful four-storm category.
The IMD said that the storm had weakened.
Close to 60 km (37 miles) inland, winds brought down electricity poles in Bhubaneswar, where the airport had been ordered to remain closed.
Odisha’s schools and colleges were also shut down.
There was also extensive structural damage to a major hospital in the city, but all patients and staff were safe, authorities said.
People were packed into shelters, spreading mats to wait for the showing of storm, TV, and social media.
With nearly 500 ambulances on standby, more than 600 pregnant women were moved to safe locations.
Power backup had been provided to some 242 medical institutions, government authorities said.
Authorities have started to move 500,000 people from seven coastal districts in neighboring Bangladesh to the north, a government minister said.
The storm is due to hit late on Saturday.
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said on Twitter that Odisha had evacuated more than a million people from the most vulnerable communities along the low-lying coast.
More than 1 million people have been evacuated from the vulnerable districts in last 24hrs. Ganjam & Puri evacuated more than 3 lakh & 1.3 lakh people respectively to safe shelters. About 5000 kitchens started operating to serve people in the shelters. #OdishaPrepared4Fani
— CMO Odisha (@CMO_Odisha) May 3, 2019
Hundreds of disaster management staff were deployed in the state, and it was told to defer any leave until May 15 to doctors and other medical staff.
Neighboring West Bengal was also planning to shut down the airport in its state capital, Kolkata.
Indian Oil Corporation Ltd, the country’s top refiner, said its 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) refinery, its newest offshore facility in Odisha, was built to withstand 250 km / h wind speeds and would not stop operations.
However, a company spokesperson told its 1,500 staff in the refinery to remain indoors.
Oil & Natural Gas Corp Ltd, India’s largest state-owned producer of oil and gas, had shifted people off its plants from Andhra Pradesh to take precautions.
A senior executive at Reliance Industries Ltd, which also runs an oil and gas block adjacent to the ONGC block, said the company followed standard operating procedures as prescribed during a cyclone.
NTPC Ltd, the state-owned power company had no plans to shut down Odisha’s Talcher 3,000-megawatt power station, said Prakash Tiwari.
The Indian cyclone season can last between April and December, when severe storms are battering coastal cities and causing widespread deaths and damage for both India and neighboring Bangladesh’s crops and property.
But recent advances in technology have helped meteorologists to better predict and prepare meteorological patterns.
For 30 hours in 1999, a super-cyclone struck the coast of Odisha killing about 10,000 people.
In 2013 almost a million people were mass evacuated and tens of thousands lives were probably saved.
Cyclones generally lose power quickly while moving inland.