Thousands evacuated as Cyclone Lehar nears Andhra coast

Agencies/Hyderabad

A “very severe” cyclone barrelled towards southeast India yesterday, forcing the evacuation of thousands of villagers, just a month after a killer storm triggered another massive rescue effort.

Cyclone Lehar - the third powerful storm to hit Andhra Pradesh in seven weeks - is moving in from the Bay of Bengal and forecast to make landfall near the city of Machilipatnam today afternoon with wind speeds of up to 170kmph.

India’s weather office predicts Lehar will also bring storm surges and heavy rains and will damage mud-and-thatch homes, disrupt power and communication networks and inundate farmland along the state’s northern coast.

An alert has been issued in the districts of East and West Godavari, Guntur and Krishna, said local officials, warning people to remain indoors.

“Some 27,000 people have been evacuated from East Godavari,” said C Parthasarathy, commissioner of state disaster management department.

He said weather conditions had been normal in the area during the day and many coastal inhabitants were reluctant to move to cyclone shelters on higher ground, but he expected more people to be evacuated by the evening.

Farmers have been told to harvest any standing rice crops, fisherman warned to suspend operations, and the army, navy and disaster response teams are on standby. Helicopters have been positioned in key locations for rescue and relief operations.

Neighbouring Odisha state said it was also preparing and had deployed disaster rapid action forces, predicting flooding as a result of heavy rains.

The weather office categorised the cyclone as “very severe.”

But Lehar, meaning “wave”, was expected to be less serious than Cyclone Phailin which slammed into the coast further to the north in October, killing 18 and leaving a trail of destruction.

Phailin, which was also classed as “very severe,” had sustained winds of over 200km an hour that uprooted trees, overturned trucks, snapped power lines and damaged crops in Andhra Pradesh and Odisha.

The most powerful storms which strike India at this time of year are classified as “super-cyclones” followed by “very severe” and then “severe.”

Cyclone Lehar comes just a week after Cyclone Helen - a “severe” storm - killed eight people and destroyed large tracts of farmland in Andhra Pradesh.

In 1999 more than 8,000 people were killed when a cyclone hit Odisha, which took years to recover.