Cyclone Amphan: ‘Most-powerful’ storm kills at least three as it makes landfall in India

More than 2.8m evacuated from Bay of Bengal coastline ahead of cyclone’s arrival

Cyclone Amphan has made landfall in India and Bangladesh, officials said, bringing heavy rainfall and winds of more than 100mph to areas already badly affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

The storm, described by meteorologists as the most powerful on record in the Bay of Bengal, has seen more than 2.8 million people evacuated across the two countries.

Bangladesh’s Red Crescent reported the first death from the cyclone on Wednesday afternoon, a volunteer who was helping evacuate people from the storm’s path when their boat capsized. A woman crushed by a tree and a 13-year-old girl killed near Kolkata were among the first deaths reported in India.

Unprecedented high winds has lashed West Bengal, where officials have effectively reimposed the weeks-long coronavirus lockdown in order to close shops and keep people off the streets.

One Twitter user, Alka Gupta, described the scene from her window as “dreadfully scary”.

Anurag Danda, a climate change researcher based in Kolkata, told The Independent his home lost power around 4.30pm local time (12pm BST). He said the city was experiencing significant “gusty winds” and that it was “getting more intense by the minute”.

“Even if Kolkata is in the periphery [of the storm’s path], damage to installations will be significant because of uprooting of trees,” he said.

“I have lived through a few cyclones in Kolkata and the Sundarbans since 1999,” he said. “I am told this is the severest.”

The India Meteorological Department​ (IMD) said Amphan started crossing over onto land at 2.30pm local time and that, due to the size of the storm, the “landfall process” would take up to four hours. Emergency officials have warned of the threat of huge storm surges, with waves as high as five meters, during this time.

SN Pradhan, director general of India’s National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), said as the storm made landfall that more than 500,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in West Bengal, and more than 150,000 in neighbouring Odisha state.

Bangladesh said as many as 5 million were at risk in low-lying areas in the storm’s path, and that it was aiming to evacuate up to 2.2 million.

Charities are particularly concerned for the impact of the storm on the Rohingya refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, which house almost 1 million people in overcrowded conditions.

Heavy rainfall has begun at the camps, though they are located some way along the coast from where the storm hit land. The makeshift refugee shelters built on rolling hills are highly susceptible to soil erosion and landslides.

While Bangladesh and Indian states like West Bengal and Odisha have well-developed plans to cope with the annual cyclone season, Amphan comes at a time when many shelters had been repurposed as coronavirus quarantine facilities.

The pandemic has also complicated efforts to get people to evacuate. Many in Digha, a seaside resort town in India, felt they were forced to choose between risking the virus or the storm, said fisherman Debasis Shyamal.

“[People] have been home for weeks, and are afraid of going into a crowd [at shelters] where they could get infected,” he told the Associated Press.

Amphan was declared the Bay of Bengal’s most powerful storm on record this week, according to the US Joint Typhoon Warning Centre, as sustained wind-speeds reached up to 167mph​. It diminished from an “extremely” to a “very” severe cyclonic storm as it met with cooler air near the shore, but gusts of wind were still reaching up to 112mph.

The region is no stranger to devastating cyclones, but scientists say the intensity of their wind speeds has increased due to climate change and warming in the region. “Storms may not be becoming more frequent but with the same number of events, the ones with greater intensity are increasing,” Mr Danda said.

Scores died last year during Cyclone Fani, the largest cyclone to hit Odisha state since the turn of the century. Simon Wang, professor of climate, Utah State University, said we don’t yet know whether last year’s record storm activity in the Bay of Bengal was “an outlier year or a year that portends things to come”.

“In our paper on Fani [in 2019], which was a terribly destructive cyclone, we noted that warming temperatures in the air and ocean surface have significantly intensified cyclones in the Bay of Bengal,” he said. “And what we’re seeing now is that abnormally warm sea surface temperatures were present in the case of Amphan, too.”