Dhaka, Bangladesh - A powerful cyclone
barrelled into eastern India on Wednesday with heavy rain, wind
and waves as millions of people were evacuated from there and
neighbouring Bangladesh in an operation complicated by the
campaign against the novel coronavirus.
Cyclone Amphan had begun moving inland, the India
Meteorological Department said in a bulletin at 3pm, after brewing for days in the Bay of Bengal to become one
of the strongest storms to hit the region in about a decade.
Officials in India's Odisha and West Bengal states said
powerful winds had torn off roofs, uprooted trees and bent
electricity poles, hitting power supplies in some areas.
In Bangladesh, junior minister for disaster management
Enamur Rahman said about 2.4 million people in the most
vulnerable districts had been shifted to more than 15 000 storm
shelters.
"It has been challenging to evacuate people while
maintaining distancing. We have doubled the number of the
cyclone centres to ensure safe distancing and hygiene," Rahman
said.
Bangladeshi officials also said they had moved hundreds of
Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, living on a flood-prone island
in the Bay of Bengal, to storm shelters.
IANS Infographics.
Standing crops could be damaged and large tracts of fertile
land washed away, officials said. Farmers were being helped to
move produce and hundreds of thousands of farm animals to higher
ground.
"Fortunately, the harvesting of the rice crop has almost
been completed. Still it could leave a trail of destruction,"
Mizanur Rahman Khan, a senior official in the Bangladesh
agriculture ministry, said of the storm.
An Indian home ministry official said authorities in West
Bengal and Odisha had struggled to house thousands of evacuees
as shelters were being used as coronavirus quarantine centres.
People walk with umbrellas in the rain ahead of Cyclone Amphan landfall. AP Photo.
Extra shelters were being prepared in markets and government
buildings with allowances made for social distancing, while
masks were being distributed to villagers.
Police in West Bengal said some people were unwilling to go
to the shelters because they were afraid of being infected by
the coronavirus and many were refusing to leave their livestock.
"We have literally had to force people out of their homes,
make them wear masks and put them in government buildings," said
a senior police official in West Bengal's capital, Kolkata.
File Photo: Kuntal Chakrabarty/IANS.
Monoranjan, a resident of Choto Mollakhali island in the
Sunderbans area of the Ganges river delta, which is expected to
bear the brunt of the storm, said the storm could destroy rice
stocks.
"We're just praying for this night to be over," he said.