Mass evacuation in India and Bangladesh due to 'Amphan' cyclone

KOLKATA: Millions of people were being moved to safety Tuesday as perhaps the fiercest cyclones in decades barrelled towards India and Bangladesh, with clearing plans convoluted by coronavirus safety measures.

Both countries are under different phases of lockdown due to the illness, with diseases despite everything flooding. 

Authorities in Bangladesh planned to empty 2.2 million people, dreading cyclone Amphan will be more destructive than Sidr in 2007, when people died, for the most part from rising oceans overwhelming low-lying regions. 

Junior disaster minister Enamur Rahman said the quantity of shelters had been multiplied to guarantee social removing, and everybody would be made to wear facemasks. 

"We are additionally keeping separate isolation rooms in the shelters for any infected patients," he told AFP. 

But the Catholic Relief (CRS) help group said coastal dwellers confronted "an impossible decision" of overcoming cyclone by waiting, or risking being infected with coronavirus in a shelter. 

CRS's Snigdha Chakraborty cautioned of "grim days ahead" as restricted access to safe water and facilities take their toll on local people whose livelihoods have just been crushed by the pandemic. 

On Tuesday Amphon was as yet a few hundred kilometers (miles) out to the ocean in the Straight of Bengal, pressing breezes of up to 235 kmph and whirlwinds kmph. 

It was required to make landfall on Wednesday evening or early night.

In India, weather office director general Mrutyunjay Mohapatra told local media that Amphon would be the most powerful weather system since a super-cyclone in 1999 killed 10,000 people in the eastern state of Odisha.

West Bengal state official Manturam Pakhira said more than 200,000 people were being evacuated from coastal districts and the Sundarbans, a vast mangrove forest area.

"Authorities are also supplying masks and sanitisers and making arrangements so that they can maintain safe distance from each other," he said.

In Odisha, relief commissioner Pradeep Kumar Jena told AFP that 20,000 people had been evacuated, with 600 disaster response teams standing.

"We will evacuate more people depending on the situation. No one will be allowed to stay in huts with thatched roofs in coastal areas," Jena said.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that he was praying for everyone's safety after chairing a virtual meeting on preparations Monday.

Although not predicted to be on the direct path of the storm, south-eastern Bangladesh is home to almost a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, most living in vast camps of shacks.

The first coronavirus cases were reported there last week, and by Tuesday there were six confirmed cases.

The UN said emergency items such as food, tarpaulins and water purification tablets had been stockpiled.

Bangladesh's coast, home to 30 million civilians, and India's east are regularly battered by cyclones that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in recent decades.

A typhoon, tornadoes and flooding killed 139,000 in Bangladesh in 1991, while in 2008 Cyclone Nargis left 138,000 people dead or missing in Myanmar.

While the storms' frequency and intensity have increased — blamed partly on climate change — deaths have fallen thanks to faster evacuations, better forecasting and more shelters.