Cyclone Biparjoy, a powerful storm that has lingered over the Arabian Sea for days, made landfall near the border of India and Pakistan on Thursday evening with winds of up to 78 miles per hour, meteorological departments in India and Pakistan said, unleashing rain and flash flooding in coastal areas.
The storm started making landfall around 6:30 p.m. local time in Gujarat State, India, and was expected to continue to move inland through the night, the India Meteorological Department said. Landfall occurred along Gujarat and the border area of the two countries, said the Pakistan Meteorological Department.
The winds had uprooted trees and brought billboards crashing down near shore areas in India, but no widespread damage had been reported through the early evening hours.
The strong winds, rain and high tides from Biparjoy — which means “disaster” in Bengali — had already claimed at least three lives before the storm made landfall. Three boys drowned off the coast of Mumbai this week, officials said, and another was still missing.
Tens of thousands of people in both countries had been evacuated from vulnerable areas before the storm’s arrival. In India, the authorities said they had evacuated 100,000 people. In neighboring Pakistan, about 73,000 people were moved to safer locations, officials told The Associated Press.
“This is nature’s force, and you can’t predict 100 percent,” Atul Karwal, the chief of India’s National Disaster Response Force, said on Thursday. “We want to be prepared for the worst.”
Television footage from Maharashtra, the state that includes Mumbai, showed high waves flooding roads along the coast. In the usually bustling coastal town of Mandvi, India, bazaars and beaches were deserted on Thursday after shutdown orders by the government, The A.P. reported.
India’s coastal areas were empty and roads and houses were deserted on Thursday, and residents at shelter homes feared their crops and livestock might not survive.
At one such shelter inside a school in Naliya, a village in Gujarat, more than 800 people were waiting for the storm to pass. Sunil Karwa, a fisherman, said he spent the night at the shelter with his wife and two children, thinking about the livestock he left behind at home in the Kutch district, a hard-hit area.
“We are all praying that there is no destruction this time, but one thing is for sure government has done whatever it could to save people,” Mr. Karwa said.
“It would be far more difficult and risky to evacuate people once the cyclone hits the coastline,” Syed Murad Ali Shah, the chief minister of the Sindh Province in Pakistan, told the provincial parliament at its meeting on Tuesday. He said the priority was to evacuate the coastal areas of Thatta, Sujawal and Badin.
Pakistan, and particularly Sindh Province, is still reeling from the devastating floods last year, which submerged large parts of the country, killed almost 1,700 people and displaced a large population.
Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said Karachi, a city of 22 million, would probably face flooding because of the scale and intensity of the winds. Last year, torrential rains caused widespread urban flooding and damage to the port city, bringing it to a standstill for days. At least 31 people died, many of whom were electrocuted or drowned after roofs and walls collapsed on them, the provincial disaster agency said.
Tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea have become more frequent in recent decades because of warming sea-surface temperatures in the region, which are enhanced by a warming climate, according to researchers.
Christine Hauser and Mike Ives contributed reporting.
Original Source: www.nytimes.com
