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Cyclone Yaas: 4 killed, mass evacuations minimise loss
West Bengal launched the biggest evacuation drive the state has ever undertaken before any calamity. More than 1.5 million people were evacuated since Monday and shifted to 14,000 cyclone shelters and relief camps.
Mass evacuation of people from the coastal areas of Odisha and West Bengal saved a lot of lives as cyclone Yaas made landfall in Odisha on Wednesday morning, said government officials. Four deaths were reported in the two states till evening.
Yaas wasn’t as ferocious as the India Meteorological Department (IMD) had predicted it to be when it hit the Odisha coast. But it still caused the sea to surge up to four metres, inundating coastal villages in Balasore and Bhadrak where it made landfall. The wind speed stayed between 130 and 145 km/hr, less than the predicted speed of 155-165 km/hr, but it was enough to knock down trees and walls, resulting in three deaths.
Odisha chief secretary Suresh Mohapatra said they evacuated over 650,000 people, most of them from Balasore, Kendrapara and Bhadrak districts. “The CM wanted no casualties, so we ensured that no person living in kutcha houses near the coast remained there. Many kutcha houses collapsed due to storm surge and high winds, but people living in those houses did not die as they had been evacuated,” Mohapatra said.
Professor Santosh Kumar of the National Institute of Disaster Management in Delhi, who has studied the post-disaster response of Odisha in the 1999 super cyclone and the 2019 Fani cyclone, said Odisha has come a long way in minimising the loss of human life in successive disasters by physically removing people to shelters.
“Odisha has been able to protect its people. That’s the most important part. In terms of bringing down the number of lives lost and people getting affected, the state has done well. This has never happened in one day. Odisha built multi-purpose cyclone shelters under National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project and effectively empowered the local communities while building an early warning dissemination system with last-mile connectivity,” said Kumar.
Dr Kailash Gupta, director of the India chapter of The International Emergency Management Society, echoed Kumar. “The first rule of any cyclone is to keep people away from its path. Odisha has done wonderfully well in that aspect. Besides, they are using technology intelligently. The huge number of cyclone shelters that have come up in last 20 years is helping the State in no small measure,” Gupta said.
But he added that Odisha needs to do a lot to minimise infrastructure damage. “In 2019, when Fani struck, Bhubaneswar was without power for almost 10 days while it took over a month to bring power to Puri, the ground zero of the cyclone. A poor state like Odisha can’t afford such a huge blow to its infrastructure on a regular basis and needs to build infrastructure that is resilient to disaster. The state needs to graduate to the next level,” Gupta said.
West Bengal launched the biggest evacuation drive the state has ever undertaken before any calamity. More than 1.5 million people were evacuated since Monday and shifted to 14,000 cyclone shelters and relief camps.
When Amphan had hit the state in May 2020, around one million people had been evacuated. Yaas spared it, but the storm surge flooded many areas. One person who was evacuated to a relief shelter was killed when he went out for fishing.
“The chief minister stayed back at the control room at the state secretariat on Tuesday. She virtually spoke to the district magistrates and pressed that more people be evacuated and brought to the relief centres,” said a senior state government official requesting anonymity.
District officials had been taking steps to evacuate people since May 22. “We had told the villagers to keep their important documents such as marksheets, identity cards and bank passbooks in one polythene bag along with some dry food so that they could be rushed to cyclone shelters without delay,” said an official of North 24 Parganas district.
People living in remote islands were evacuated on May 24 because the sea was expected to be rough by May 25. Pregnant women were also evacuated from some remote islands in the Sunderbans at least 48 hours before the cyclone hit.
Gupinath Bhandari, associate professor of civil engineering at Jadavpur University, said Yaas cannot be compared to other cyclones such as Amphan and Aila that had directly hit the state, killing many people. “But this time we saw very good coordination at every level. Control rooms were set up right up to the block level and the chief minister was sitting at the secretariat, monitoring and giving instructions. This I think made the difference,” said Bhandari, who has specialisation in disaster management.
