HYDERABAD, 22 September 2005 — At least 64 people died, tens of thousands displaced and scores of fishermen are missing after a severe storm in the Bay of Bengal, officials said yesterday.
Railroad tracks and major highways connecting cities along the coast were flooded as the state’s two main rivers breached embankments on Tuesday, Shashank Goel, an official in charge of disaster management, said in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh.
Officials said at least 58 people were killed by the strong rains and winds, which flattened homes, knocked down power lines and uprooted trees. Six people were killed when their homes in the coastal districts collapsed Tuesday.
At least 800 people remained missing in southern India yesterday and hundreds of fishermen were unaccounted for in Bangladesh after a severe storm in the Bay of Bengal killed 50 people, officials said.
More than 140,000 residents of low-lying villages have been evacuated to 465 relief camps set up in government buildings and schools located on higher ground in the worst-hit Khammam, East Godavari, West Godavari and Krishna districts, officials said. They had earlier said more than 1,000 people were missing in the state, including scores of fishermen, but some of them had returned to shore. “Of the over 1,000 missing people, 150-200 fishermen have been traced and are safe,” Goel said.
Goel said floodwaters had started to recede as rains had eased in the region.
Rescue workers in motorized rubber dinghies picked up people stranded in floods, while military helicopters dropped food and water packets to marooned people and lifted them off rooftops. Thousands were evacuated to relief camps.
“Water entered my house around midnight on Monday. We lost everything, including our clothes,” Samba Siva Rao, a coastal resident, said.
Most of the 50 killed in Andhra Pradesh were either electrocuted or died in house collapses, officials said.
In Bangladesh, leaders of the low-lying nation’s fishing community said yesterday they had not heard from about 300 fishermen after the storm triggered high waves and heavy rain along the coast this week.
“We are expecting some of them to come back,” Kabir Ahmed Sawdagar said, adding that in the past fishermen reported missing had returned safely weeks after a storm.
But Golam Mustafa Chowdhury, president of the Fishing Trawlers Association in the coastal district of Barguna, said 31 trawlers with about 450 fishermen sank during the storm and he feared most of the men on them had drowned.
Yesterday, there was no electricity in about 100 towns and 1,300 villages on Andhra Pradesh’s coast where rail, air and road traffic has been severely disrupted.
At least 23 trains, some of them linking north India to the southern parts of the country, were canceled and 12 more were diverted to other routes. With floodwaters beginning to recede, most train services were expected to resume by today, railway officials said.
Cargo handling at Visakhapatnam port — one of India’s busiest — had resumed after being suspended for two days due to the storm.
Hundreds of vehicles were stranded on a key highway linking eastern India with the south of the country and the airport in the port city of Visakhapatnam was closed for the second day as its runway was still partially waterlogged.
Rains had eased in most parts of the state yesterday but its largest river, the Godavari, had burst its bank in several areas and was threatening to spill over. Officials said they were worried about losses to sugarcane, chilli and paddy crops.
“Lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of acres of fields have got inundated,” Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, Andhra Pradesh’s chief minister, said after a aerial survey of flood-hit areas. — Additional input from Reuters
