Cyclone Arnab makes six-hour landfall on Andhra Pradesh coast, at least five dead as 180,000 evacuated across two states
The basin's historic killer was the sea while this week's dead met live wires and a falling tree
Images
Varun Dhawan Called Karan Johar A 'Child' Amid Fight Over Chand Mera Dil, HJTIHH Clash; KWK Host Says 'I Was Hurt'
timesnownews.com
Cyclone Arnab, classed by the India Meteorological Department as a very severe cyclonic storm, came ashore on the Andhra Pradesh coast early on Wednesday in a landfall process that took more than six hours to complete. At least five people have reportedly died in the state, and more than 180,000 residents of Andhra Pradesh and neighbouring Odisha were moved out before the storm arrived.
The Bay of Bengal is the world's deadliest cyclone basin — a shallow shelf that piles wind-driven water onto densely settled coasts. After the Odisha catastrophe of 1999, India rebuilt its defences around forecasting and mass evacuation rather than sea walls, and death tolls from comparable storms have fallen by orders of magnitude since, even as the basin's waters warm. Arnab ran on that machinery: a 9:50 am IMD bulletin placed the storm over the Andhra Pradesh and Yanam coasts, and the districts behind the shoreline had already been emptied.
What the evacuation machine cannot clear is the grid. The three deaths detailed so far involved no water at all. A 46-year-old man died in Bhimavaram, in West Godavari district, shortly after midnight when a tree fell on him; he was declared dead on arrival at hospital. In Visakhapatnam district, a 53-year-old man was killed on Tuesday night by a live wire that snapped over an agricultural field channel. A 55-year-old woman in Yellamanchili, in Anakapalli district, stepped on an exposed live wire outside her home on Wednesday morning and died. Rambabu, a newspaper delivery man, is in intensive care after an electric pole collapsed onto his moped near a temple in Bhimavaram.
The storm destroyed at least 180 houses and brought down 220 trees, cutting power across large areas of Andhra Pradesh — the same infrastructure that did the killing. Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has kept the authorities on high alert and announced ex-gratia payments of five lakh rupees to each bereaved family.
The state now spends in advance on the forecast-and-evacuation apparatus that moves people away from the sea, and pays afterwards, in fixed sums, for what the storm takes anyway. As the coast electrifies and densifies, the residual risk migrates from drowning to electrocution: the sea is managed, the wires are not.
The coast was cleared of 180,000 people before the water arrived; the lines stayed where they were.