Hurricane Fani strikes east of India and heads to Bangladesh: at least nine dead

At least nine people died on Friday when Cyclone Fani struck eastern India and was heading towards Bangladesh with winds of up to 200 km / h. They caused cuts in coconut palms, food stalls, and power and water cuts.

The monstrous hurricane, which has landed in the sacred city of Puri, India, is one of the most powerful in the Indian Ocean for years.

In recent days, the state authorities of Odisha, where 10,000 people died from a cyclone in 1999, evacuated more than one million people under threat. of floods up to 1.5 meters of water.

On Friday, the storm killed nine people, including eight in India and the rest in Bangladesh.

According to the Press Trust of India (PTI), among the dead, were a teenager, a woman battered by debris and an elderly woman suffering from a heart attack in one of the shelters managed for the victims.

Prabhat Mahapatra, head of the Odisha disaster relief office, said he still could not confirm the death toll.

"About 160 people have been injured in Puri and relief operations are continuing," he told AFP.

For their part, authorities in Bangladesh, where Fani was heading, said that a woman had also died from a tree and that 14 coastal cities had been flooded after the dam caused by the flood.

The head of disaster management, Mohammad Hashim, told AFP that some 400,000 people from the area had been taken to shelters.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the state of West Bengal have also been ordered to evacuate the area. Local airports were closed, trains were not running and vehicle traffic was prohibited on the roads.

"Night was falling and we could barely see five meters in front of us," said a resident of Puri.

"There are food stalls on the street and shop signs that have jumped," a man from a hotel told AFP. "The wind is violent," he added.

Authorities in Puri and Bhubaneswar have been working to remove fallen trees and restore the phone and the internet.

Fani then moved to the northwest, in the state of West Bengal and Bangladesh, on a trajectory of about 100 million inhabitants.

The authorities of West Bengal have evacuated thousands of people in coastal cities, told AFP Javed Ahmed Khan, head of the disaster.

Late Friday in the city of Calcutta (4.5 million inhabitants), generally noisy, calm prevailed, in anticipation of the hurricane that was to arrive Saturday.

"We are monitoring the situation 24 hours a day and doing all that is necessary, be careful, stay in a safe place for the next two days," tweeted Mamata Banerjee, chief of staff of West Bengal.

The winds were felt even on Mount Everest, where a tent flew on Camp No. 2 at 6,400 meters altitude.

Meteorologists cautioned against the "total destruction" of huts, ripped electrical and communication poles, "flooded evacuation routes" and crop damage in some areas.

Some 3,000 shelters and government buildings have been built to house more than one million people in Odisha.

The ports were closed, but the Indian Navy sent six warships to the region, in which the country's largest oil company, ONGC, evacuated nearly 500 workers from offshore platforms.

In Puri, the sacred city of Hinduism that attracts millions of visitors and pilgrims, steps have also been taken to protect the 850-year-old Jagannath temple.

AFP correspondents at Puri pointed out that it looked like a ghost town, with uprooted trees and rising water even hours before the arrival of Fani.

The supply of electricity and water has been interrupted in most of this city of 200,000 inhabitants. Metal plates covered the front of the shops and the sand of the neighboring beaches flew in the streets.

Fani is the fourth storm of its kind to hit the east coast of India in three decades.

In 2017, Cyclone Ockhi killed nearly 250 people and left more than 600 missing in the states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

By Sailendra Sil and Peter Hutchison in Puri (AFP)