How ‘a tragedy of humongous proportion’ was averted despite Cyclone Fani’s devastation
Locals stand by damage made by Cyclone Fani in the Penthakata fishing village of Puri, in the eastern Indian state of Orissa, Saturday, May 4, 2019. A mammoth preparation exercise that included the evacuation of more than 1 million people appears to have spared India a devastating death toll from one of the biggest storms in decades, though the full extent of the damage was yet to be known, officials said Saturday. (AP Photo)
United Nations and Indian officials credit a relatively low death toll to the mass evacuation of roughly 2.7 million people before Cyclone Fani hit India Friday and Bangladesh over the weekend.
The Indian government’s “zero casualty” policy for cyclones and the advance warning provided by the weather industry as a whole helped keep the number of people killed to roughly 60 people so far, though officials say the total may rise as communications are restored.
“They seem to have done a very good job in terms of minimizing the possibility for loss of life," said Denis McClean, a spokesperson for the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (ODRR) at a news briefing. "The almost pinpoint accuracy of the warnings, the early warnings from the IMD [India Meteorological Department) allowed them to conduct a very well targeted evacuation plan which resulted in 1.1 million people mainly moving to about 900 cyclone shelters [in India]."
Indian officials sent millions of text messages, broadcast warnings over public address systems and sent buses to help vulnerable people, bringing them to sturdy cyclone shelters that had been stocked with water and food, The New York Times reported.
An additional 1.6 million people in Bangladesh were evacuated before the storm, according to EcoWatch.com.
Bad weather from the storm system was projected to affect around 100 million people in South Asia, from India’s distant Andaman Islands to Mount Everest in Nepal, the Associated Press reported.
At least 42 people died in India after Powerful Cyclone Fani slammed onshore as one of the strongest cyclones to hit India within the last 20 years. Another 17 deaths have been reported in Bangladesh.
Fani made landfall early Friday morning between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. local time along the coast of the Indian state of Odisha, close to Puri. Fani's strength was the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane in the Atlantic or eastern Pacific oceans when it barreled onshore.
“In the event of such a major calamity like this -- where Odisha was hit by close to a super-cyclone -- instead of being a tragedy of humongous proportion, we are in the process of restoring critical infrastructure. That is the transformation that Odisha has had,” the state’s top government official, Naveen Patnaik, said in a statement.
The relatively low casualty count demonstrates much improved disaster readiness in India since 1999, when a “super” cyclone killed around 10,000 people and devastated large parts of Odisha, according to the AP.
“The difference in lives saved is due to forecast improvement and people receiving warnings and acting on them,” said AccuWeather founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers. “Storms like this in the past have killed hundreds of thousands of people. So even if the eventual death toll rises, it’s likely less than one percent of what it would have been 30 years ago.”
AccuWeather meteorologists alerted residents of northeastern India and Bangladesh of dangers from the cyclone a week before it made landfall, even prior to when Fani had formed.
Report a Typo
