Cyclone Evacuation Kept India Storm Victims Alive

Agya Amma surveyed the pile of twisted wood and shredded thatch that was her home in this seaside Indian village. Like most everything else in Podampetta, it was all but swept away when Cyclone Phailin roared in off the Bay of Bengal with torrential rains and winds topping 200 kilometers (131 miles) per hour.

Unlike past storms that have lashed India’s eastern coast, however, Phailin did not extract a heavy human toll, thanks to the evacuation of nearly 1 million people in one of India’s poorest regions. By Monday, only 25 people had been reported killed, although tens of thousands of homes were destroyed.

“If we had stayed here, everyone in the village would be dead,” said Amma, a 55-year-old fisherwoman. “I consider myself lucky to be alive.”

The apparently successful evacuation effort was earning rare praise for a country known for large-scale disasters that have caused high death tolls in the past. But Phailin still dealt its share of misery, as hundreds of thousands of coastal residents found themselves huddling in shelters, their homes flattened and crops destroyed by the most powerful storm to hit India in more than a decade.

India began evacuating coastal residents at least four days before the cyclone hit. Amma and others from her tiny Podampetta village walked 1.5 kilometers (a mile) to the nearest government shelter and spent two nights waiting out the storm.

Like many in Orissa state, Amma lost everything when Phailin hit.

“I have lost my house, my boat and my fishing nets,” she said, hugging herself tightly near a beach strewn with storm debris – brightly painted broken boat hulls, chunks of concrete, and a piece of a plastic statue of the Hindu god Shiva.

A lake the size of a football field, formed when sea water surged ashore, cut across the main road out of Podampetta.

“There is nothing to eat, no place for me to stay,” said Buchi Amma, 50, another Podampetta villager not related to Agya Amma. She and others have been sleeping temporarily in a nearby public building, but she has no idea how she and her husband will be able to buy food. “I only want life to get back to normal,” she said, standing atop the concrete slabs of her shattered home.

Tens of thousands are newly homeless in Orissa and the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. More than 500,000 hectares (1.2 million acres) of crops worth an estimated $395 million were damaged, according to Orissa’s disaster minister, S.N. Patro.

Officials were still working Monday to clear roads and restore communications. Train services were being restored.

The death toll of 25 was expected to rise as officials reach isolated areas along the cyclone-battered coast, though it is expected to remain far below the 10,000 killed in 1999 when another cyclone hit the same coast. More than 6,000 people were killed in June by flooding and mudslides in another Indian state, Uttarakhand.

Parts of Orissa were facing massive flooding after heavy rains brought by the cyclone caused rivers to overflow. Hundreds of thousands of people were marooned Monday in the district of Balasore, where the situation “is critical,” according to P.K. Mohapatra, the state’s head of relief operations. Authorities were air-dropping packages of food in the area, while army personnel were deployed to help with relief operations.

The Indian coast guard rescued 17 sailors whose cargo ship, the MV Bingo, sank during the cyclone, officials said. They were taken to a hospital in Kolkata for a check-up and are safe now, coast guard Commandant Rajendra Nath told the Press Trust of India news agency.

The Indian Ocean is a cyclone hot spot. Of the 35 deadliest storms in history, 27 have come through the Bay of Bengal – including the 1999 cyclone – and have landed in either India or Bangladesh.