Gales lash India and Pakistan coast as cyclone approaches

Mandvi, India (AFP):

Crashing waves pounded the coastline of India and Pakistan on Thursday, hours before the landfall of a powerful cyclone that has prompted mass evacuations.

Nearly 150,000 people have fled the predicted path of Cyclone Biparjoy, which means “disaster” in Bengali, with meteorologists warning it could devastate homes and tear down power lines when it lands.

Powerful winds and storm surges were forecast to hammer a 325-kilometre (200-mile) stretch of coast between Mandvi in India’s Gujarat state and Karachi in Pakistan.

Jayantha Bhai, a 35-year-old shopkeeper in India’s beach town of Mandvi, told AFP soon after dawn on Thursday that he was afraid for his family’s safety.

“This is the first time I’ve experienced a cyclone,” Bhai said, a father of three boys aged between eight and 15, who planned to wait out the cyclone in his small concrete home behind the shop.

“This is nature, we can’t fight with it,” he said as rain lashed his home.

In Mandvi, torrential rain and heavy wind gusts blew sheets of water across roads and reduced visibility to a dull grey mist.

Almost all shops were shuttered, with shoppers crowding the few that remained open to buy last-minute food and water supplies.

At sea, winds were gusting at up to 180 kilometres per hour (112 miles per hour), with speeds predicted to reach 115-125 kph and gusts of up to 140 kph by the time it makes landfall.

India’s meteorologists warned of the potential for “widespread damage”, including the destruction of crops, “bending or uprooting of power and communication poles” and disruption of railways and roads.

Schools turned shelters

In India, the Gujarat state government said 75,000 people had relocated from coastal and low-lying areas to shelter.

Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman said on Wednesday 73,000 people had been moved from southeastern coastal areas and housed in 75 relief camps.

“It is a cyclone the likes of which Pakistan has never experienced,” she told reporters.

Many of the areas affected are the same inundated in last year’s catastrophic monsoon floods, which put a third of Pakistan underwater, damaging two million homes and killing more than 1,700 people.

“These are all results of climate change,” she said.

“Our concern is when the cyclone is over, how will we feed our children?” said 80-year-old Wilayat Bibi, in a relief camp in the city of Badin. “We will be languishing with no resources.”