Orissa cyclone leaves a trail of devastation, epidemic, hunger and despair

Price of apathy: The toll would have been less if warnings had been heeded. Bodies of victims piled up for cremation at Paradip beachKhirode Swain had no chance. On the evening of October 29 he ventured out into the ear-splitting roar of 290 kmph killer winds. India's most devastating cyclone was making landfall at Paradip port in Orissa.Swain tried leaving his shelter in a concrete school building to visit his one-room tenement to check his belongings. It was the costliest mistake that the 40-year-old farm hand could have ever made. His house, like that of millions others was flattened, and Swain, like uncounted thousands, was simply swept away by a surge of ocean water pulled inland by the cyclone. Price of apathy: An idol of Kali stands guard over a fallen temple.Swain's bloated body is among the hundreds that are being stacked up across Orissa before being cremated or bulldozed by earthmovers into vast, faceless graves.The bodies keep coming - twisted, bloated and broken - washing up from the overflowing creeks and ponds around the port city, lying by the roadside. Death, and its nauseating stench, is everywhere. Cry for relief: A woman weeps after being rescued in JamjhardiAt Paradip, ground zero of the cyclone's landfall, everyone knew of the storm. Advance warnings were issued and people evacuated to concrete buildings - those that could be accommodated, that is. The others simply perished out in the open.As the cyclone steadily grew in power, Orissa - devastated frequently by killer storms - simply fell apart. Overnight, the state seems to have slipped into a stone-age apocalypse. A primitive survival instinct has surfaced as hungry, homeless and desperate mobs roam the battered roads, waylaying passing trucks and rioting for food. Diarrhoea and other diseases are spreading. Cry for relief: An army relief partySchools, colleges and offices are closed indefinitely. Hundreds of villages in the cyclone's path were wiped off the map, their fate and death toll unknown. Guesstimates put the toll at 5,000 dead but it could be much more.An estimated eight million people or a fourth of the population of Orissa spread across 11 districts have been affected by the cyclone. Conservative figures put the number of houses demolished at around three lakh. Apart from 20,000 cattle dead, bumper standing crops spread across 3.23 lakh hectares in the state's granary bowl were instantly destroyed. Overall, the damage caused by the deathwind is said to be around Rs 1,000 crore. Cry for relief: wading through NH5"Oh God! It will take years for Orissa to recoup," says an anguished Union Minister of State for Surface Transport Debendra Pradhan. It will take months, in some cases maybe even more than a year, to restore electricity and water supply, repair the roads.With the administration nonexistent, army columns are spreading out through Orissa, clearing roads and trying to reach emergency supplies. Distribution will be a logistical nightmare. This is a critical time. "People without access to food and water cannot survive for long," warns Julien Francis of the Red Cross. The Central Government has begun a massive relief operation - moving about 4,000 tonnes of food and medicine every day by air, road and ship - but it's a drop in the ocean. Six naval ships are taking the sea route, shuttling supplies from Vizag in Andhra. "All that is being currently done is at sustenance levels," admits Chinmay Basu, secretary, state Panchayati Raj Department. Click here to EnlargeFive days after the storm was gone, nothing in the way of relief had come by to thousands. At Paradip and Asa-taranga, hungry mobs looted anything they could lay their hands on."Things will cool down once relief reaches these areas properly," reasons Orissa Chief Minister Giridhar Gamang. But when? One of the few offices that can boast of having electricity in Bhubaneswar is the office of D.N. Padhee, state relief commissioner. Four days after the storm, distress calls were still coming in from all over the state. Kendrapara still can't be reached; Paradip needs at least 14 trucks of relief materials ever day but is getting just three; the trucks won't go without an escort for fear of being looted by the mob. The job isn't getting any easier for Padhee. "Our main problem," he says, "is access." It's a problem which has been solved in the strangest manner by the administration: dump relief in whichever area is accessible - even if it is not very badly affected. Grisly aftermath: Dead animals and bodies float in a field in KendraparaIt was no ill wind that brought Orissa to this pass. Meteorologists say it was the strongest cyclone in India's memory, probably more powerful than the 1971 tempest that hit Kendrapara killing 10,000.Cyclones are graded from 1 to 5, depending on their intensity and damage potential. This would be grade 5, a cyclone of catastrophic intensity. At least 300 km across when it struck, its wind speed varied between 150 and 300 kmph. Darkness descended at noon as the storm rocked the state from around midday of October 29. Paradip with other coastal towns like Kendrapara, Rajnagar, Mahakalpada took the worst pounding. The gale was at its furious worst there: initial reports indicated that sea waves up to 7 m high had rushed in and at places travelled up to 15 km inland. Grisly aftermath: Fishing boats find a new resting place close to NuagarhWorse, normally a cyclone vents its fury in a space of about eight hours. But this one hung over Paradip and other places for almost a day, bringing with it gale force winds and incessant rain. George Fernandes, Union defence minister, who flew into Paradip when the storm was still raging, says, "Everything lay flattened and it looked like one vast ocean. Paradip was a ghost town with the dead strewn all over. I have never seen such devastation." When he touched down finally, he was gheraoed by a mob of almost a thousand people demanding food and shelter.Grisly aftermath: Relief workers clearing bodies in ParadipEven Bhubaneswar - though 190 km away from the eye of the storm - took a severe pounding. A slight drizzle from the previous evening had given way to heavy downpour by the morning of October 29. By noon, the wind had picked up speed and its rustle had turned into a roar.The high-rises shook, window panes shattered, billboards were blown away and trees were simply tossed around like matchsticks. It began around 11 a.m. and peaked around 3 p.m. But for another seven long hours, the city was shaken violently. "I have never heard anything of this sort ever in my life," says Pratap Sarangi, a visibly shaken elderly resident. One minute the wind roared; then a brief lull of about half a minute, punctuated by something like a long shrill whistle; the next moment the roar was back with the wind pounding the walls. As the cyclone passed through, it rained heavily. Bhubaneswar gets no more than an average of 1,200 mm of rain a year. But on that fateful day, the city received 426 mm of rainfall. Grains of hope: Hungry children await their turn for food organised by local people in ChandipurAt Kakatpur, 40 km from Bhubaneswar, on the morning of October 29, Dilipkumar Senapati tried to cross a 10 ft-wide road to a safer place. The asbestos roof of his house had been blown off, exposing his family to Orissa's worst storm in a century.Senapati tried to take his wife and child to the pucca house across the road. It took him half an hour. "You try with all your might to go forward, and all it does is take you where it wants you to go," Senapati says, speaking with reverence, and fear, of the wind. At 260 kmph it commands both.At Nuagarh, a once-thriving fishing port on the estuary of the Debi river, not far from Senapati's now roofless home, Pitwas Biswal watched damage of far greater proportions being inflicted. Large fishing trawlers were mauled out of shape. They crashed against the offices that small fishing companies had set up. One of his, the Basumati, just docked for repairs, was beyond it in a matter of a few hours. Smaller boats, Biswal says, "almost flew like paper", and landed in the nearby paddy fields. Grains of hope: The young and the old queue up for rations in ParadipThe storm proved to be a great leveller. As harried commoners struggled to survive the difficult days, even Chief Minister Gamang found the going just as difficult. Power supply to his official residence had snapped too and after a while, the generator, out of diesel, stopped.As the cyclone ripped through, Gamang worked furiously on the phone - calling up the PMO, the defence minister and neighbouring chief ministers like Jyoti Basu and N. Chandra babu Naidu for help. But as it approached midnight, the three telephones at his home went dead one after the other. At 9 p.m., only two telephones were working. At 11 p.m., only one. By midnight, it too had gone dead. Orissa's last link to the outside world had snapped. The state was effectively incommunicado for the next two days, Gamang only managing a one-minute phone call to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee over his son's satellite phone.So, was Orissa prepared? "I knew two days ahead and so did everyone else," says Prasanna Hota, Orissa's principal resident commissioner in Delhi. "But when they say 260 kmph it takes time for it to sink in. We kept thinking and hoping it would pass." Hope wasn't enough. On October 28, the phones were still working, and over a lakh people - a minuscule number - were evacuated, though the police often had to deliver a few lathi blows to make people move. "This isn't Dallas or Florida," argues Hota. "Here a small hut with a few brass pots and two chickens is a man's total capital and he will not leave it behind at any cost." Grains of hope: The air force dropping provisionsBesides, where do they go? Orissa has only 21 concrete shelters, each capable of holding at most 2,000 people. As always, no warnings reached many thousands. Cutting-edge technology didn't seem to help either.The Indian Space Research Organisation has strung 250 storm-warning receivers all along the Indian coast. In a time of crisis, a satellite is supposed to switch on the receivers, which broadcast a siren and put out warnings in the local language. The Met office insists 28 of the 34 hooters in Orissa were active. Scoffs Hota: "I have never heard a satellite receiver give out a siren or announcement."It didn't matter once the cyclone made landfall. First, no one was prepared for its severity. Secondly, jeopardising Government plans were the miscalculation that the major towns such as Bhubaneswar and Cuttack would not be hit. Once these cities came within the cyclone's range - the cities were just outside the 100 km long cloud wall of the cyclone but close enough to take a severe battering - all plans simply collapsed. It didn't help that much of the state bureaucracy appeared to be in a comatose state. They were already angered by the frequent transfers made by the chief minister. Also Orissa's coffers were empty and had only the previous week persuaded the Centre to release funds to pay the salaries of government officials. When the Centre released Rs 500 crore as relief for the storm, instead of spending the money to bring succour to the millions affected, the first thing the state Government did was to use Rs 100 crore to pay salaries to its staff. Road to nowhere: Cut off from the world, passengers walk down a damaged rail track in SabiraAlso, many of the top bosses set a poor example for the rest. When the storm broke, the collector of one of the districts dashed off to protect his own family in a neighbouring town leaving no one in charge to take vital decisions to provide relief office blames the tardy reaction of the state administration.The state looks to the Centre, which insists its role is limited to providing funds and keeping Central organisations such as the army and the railways on standby to help. "We also give guidance and training. On the ground a disaster has to be managed by the state," says Central Relief Commissioner Bhagat Singh. The state too has a relief commissioner and district-level natural disaster management committees. The problem is no one knows who is actually in charge and there is very little coordination. At the Centre, the Natural Disaster Management Committee is under the Ministry of Agriculture, many state relief commissioners work under the Revenue Department, some have independent charge. The result: chaos. Road to nowhere: while goods-laden trucks are stranded on flooded National Highway 5 near BhadrakNo one can possibly stop a super-cyclone like the one that devastated the port and set Orissa back by a few years. But the country must ensure it has a disaster management plan that works. Orissa is cyclone country and should have had hundreds of concrete shelters. Otherwise, evacuation would remain a joke.Simple measures like providing satellite telephones and back up power systems could have helped. That it took almost a week before the state and the Centre could swing into action to provide rudimentary rescue and relief measures is an indication of just how bad things can get.And so Sindhylata Parida, 12, sits and cries in a corner of Mahakalpada in Kendrapara district. She hasn't eaten in six days, her cattle are dead, her parents and home lost. More than 80 per cent of the villagers are marooned, and food hasn't reached them. On November 2, they heard a helicopter fly overhead but no food packets. The next day a few packets were dropped. And that's about it. Mahakalpada must wait - and hope. There is nothing else it can do.- with Avirook Sen and Subhadra Menon Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 15, 1999 00:00 IST--- ENDS ---

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Orissa cyclone leaves a trail of devastation, epidemic, hunger and despair

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