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The cyclone Amphan rages in the West of Bengal, about 20 kilometres to the east of Sagar Island in the Sunderbans on Wednesday, packing winds with gusts of up to a maximum speed of 185 km / h, causing heavy rainfall and leaving a trail of devastation across a wide swath of the state, from deltas in the urban areas of the districts of Calcutta.
It brought a storm surge – a wall of sea water which is often one of the main causes of death in the principal systems of the time – which was raging in the inside.
“The situation is more worrying that the coronavirus of the pandemic. We don’t know how to handle it,” West Bengal, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee told reporters late on Wednesday. “Almost everything is destroyed in the villages of the coast of the state.”
Banerjee, who was to assess the status of the secretariat of state, said that at least 10-12 people have been killed.
“The losses will be in three levels of loss of life and property, because the storm was tremendous, the loss of basic infrastructure, which will take months to jump back to normal, and in the third place, the loss of livelihoods due to saline water intrusion and large scale inundation. I have received reports of embankment breaks of the Sagar Island, Ramganga, Hingalganj, and some other places. Many of the embankments are seeing the overflow of water because the rivers have grown, these are broken into days”, said Tuhin Garcia, director of the School of Oceanographic Studies at the Jadavpur University.
Amphan, the most severe storm in the Bay of Bengal since the Odisha super cyclone of 1999, made landfall between 3.30 pm and 5.30 pm.
In neighbouring Odisha, at least two deaths were reported until the Wednesday night. A two months old baby was killed in a wall collapse in the morning after the heavy rains of the night to the morning in Bhadrak district. In another incident, a woman died in Balasore after an electrical pole, displaced by the storm, fell on her.
In Bangladesh, the officials confirmed six people, including a five-year-old boy and a 75-year-old man, both of which are affected by the fall of trees, and a cyclone emergency volunteer, who drowned.
Some three million people were left without power, Bangladesh, officials said.
About 224.6 millimeters (0.7 feet) of rain fell early Wednesday and winds of up to 113 km / h (70 mph) criticized Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal.
Video shared on social media showed electricity transformers of sparks and explosion in the wild weather. Some reports said that 5,500 houses were damaged in one of West Bengal’s district.
The cyclone is expected to weaken as it moves north and northeast, and back to a tropical depression on Thursday afternoon, the Meteorological Department of India (IMD), said.
In the southwest of Bangladesh, five feet high and the storm surge broke through a retaining wall and swamped farmland.
Bangladesh officials were particularly concerned about the damage to the Sunderbans, a UNESCO heritage site famous for its mangrove forest and the tiger population, which they said bore the brunt of the cyclone.
Houses “seem to have been run over by a bulldozer,” said Babul Mondal, 35, a resident of the village on the edge of the Indian side of the Sunderbans.
1999 super cyclone that left nearly 10,000 deaths in Odisha, eight years after a typhoon, tornadoes and flooding killed 139,000 in Bangladesh.
In 1970, half a million perished due to the Cyclone Bhola.
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