- By
- BIMAN MUKHERJI
- and
- VIBHUTI AGARWAL
Associated PressA woman carries away a branch of a tree uprooted by Cyclone Phailin as municipal workers clear a main highway in Berhampur, India, Sunday.
Cyclone Phailin left a trail of destruction after hitting southeast India with 200-kilometer-per-hour winds, torrential rain and surging waves. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from the region in an effort to prevent fatalities. Photo: AP
As dawn broke in areas ravaged overnight by Cyclone Phailin's 200-kilometer-per-hour winds, torrential rain and storm-surge waves, government emergency-preparedness officials and locals started to assess the damage—which appeared limited largely to property and crops.
Indian Meteorological Department Director Laxman Singh Rathore told a news conference Sunday in New Delhi that so far there seemed to be no deaths.
Pradipta Kumar Mohapatra, special relief commissioner for the state of Orissa, the area hardest hit by the storm, told The Wall Street Journal Sunday morning that the official death toll there was seven.
A 1999 cyclone of similar severity in the area killed as many as 15,000 people.
Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesCyclone Phailin: The Aftermath in Pictures
"The storm blew away the roof of my home last night. Luckily, we had moved into a government building because officials had been telling us to move out for the past two days," said Raju Shetty, a resident of Khurdamal, a village in Orissa. "Otherwise we would have surely died."
With damage spread across a wide swath of hard-to-reach places and communications largely knocked out by the storm, it could take days for a complete assessment of the impact from the storm. But officials said they were optimistic that evacuations and weaker-than-expected cyclone winds had saved many lives.
Phailin was similar in size to Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm in the U.S. which had 265-kilometer-per-hour winds and killed 1,200 people in New Orleans, experts said.
"The storm was so strong last night that I thought it would blow down my brick-walled home," said Suraj Mohanty, a resident of the village, which is about 50 kilometers from the state's capital, Bhubaneswar. "Trees were crashing all around us throughout the night. We were praying for it to stop and we have somehow made it out alive."
Every year, about five cyclones develop near India shortly before or after the June-to-September monsoon season. They are rarely as strong as Cyclone Phailin, meteorologists say.
Phailin, which has been categorized as a "very severe" cyclone, had a storm surge—a wall of water forced inland by wind—which was between 3 and 3.5 meters high.
It wasn't as severe as the cyclone that swept over Orissa in 1999. That storm, which wasn't named, had wind speeds of 260 to 270 kilometers per hour and a storm surge of more than six meters. Indian authorities were confident that lessons learned and new technology have made this storm much less deadly. When the Oct. 29, 1999 cyclone landed, residents along the coast received only one day of warning. Most didn't have enough time to react.
Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics LLC, a weather-consulting firm based in New York, said that while the ferocity of the cyclone could put it among the top 10 for the Bay of Bengal, it landed in a less populated area where people can easily escape to higher ground.
The most deadly cyclones have been around the city of Kolkata and in neighboring Bangladesh, where many live on the water and have nowhere to shelter.
"If this storm were heading into Kolkata and the Ganges River delta it would probably be a much bigger disaster," said Mr. Bastardi.
—Eric Bellman and Prasanta Sahu contributed to this article.
