DEVASTATION: Vehicles move through a flooded road next to the trees fallen over railway tracks after being damaged by strong winds caused by the Cyclone Hudhud in the southern Indian city of Visakhapatnam on October 14. Photo: REUTERS
By Steff Gaulter
Powerful Cyclone Hudhud has slammed into eastern India, causing widespread flooding and landslides.
Hudhud was a huge system, stretching 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) from north to south and brought rain to almost the entire coast of India.
Of course the most destructive weather was located in the centre of the storm, and this made landfall just to the south of the city of Visakhapatnam.
Visakhapatnam, or Vizag for short, is the commercial hub of Andhra Pradesh state, and home to over two million people.
Cyclone Hudhud started as a cluster of thunderstorms that drifted over the Andaman Islands on October 6.
Even at this stage, it was a powerful system.
In the space of just 24 hours, 202mm (eight inches) of rains were reported in Port Blair, and by this stage the system hadn’t even developed into a tropical storm.
The thunderstorms drifted west, over the Bay of Bengal and began drawing energy from the warm seas.
This injection of energy enabled the system to develop into a tropical cyclone, and therefore the winds steadily became stronger and the rain more intense.
By the time Cyclone Hudhud made landfall, the sustained winds within the storm were estimated to be 200kph (125mph) with gusts up to 240kph (150mph).
There is always a fair amount of confusion regarding the exact wind speed within a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal.
This is partly because the wind speed is not measured directly, but instead is estimated from satellite images, but also is due to the fact that different meteorological agencies classify winds speed in different ways.
The Indian Meteorological Department average their wind speeds over a three minute time period, whereas the US based Joint Typhoon Warning Centre average their speeds over one minute.
The shorter time period would be expected to give a higher average value, so the JTWC will almost always have higher estimates of wind speed.
Both agencies believe that Cyclone Hudhud had the equivalent strength of a Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which is used to rate the strength of hurricanes in the waters around the Americas.
The scale runs from one to five, with five being the strongest, and a category three storm is classed as a major hurricane.
A storm of this strength can be expected to cause major damage, even to well-built homes and many trees will be uprooted or simply snapped in half.
Thankfully, storms of this strength in the Bay of Bengal are fairly rare.
However, those that do develop often turn out to be deadly.
The most intense storm on record to hit India struck in 1999, before tropical cyclones were named in the Indian Ocean.
This storm, simply referred to as the 1999 Odisha Cyclone, followed a very similar path to Cyclone Hudhud.
When the Odisha Cyclone made landfall, as well as damaging winds and flooding rains, it also generated a storm surge that was up to eight metres (26 feet) in places.
This was like a tsunami that pushed up to 20 kilometres (twelve miles) inland.
Everything in its path was destroyed, hundreds of thousands of homes were flattened and two and a half million farm animals were killed.
Nearly ten thousand people were killed by the storm, and since then the government has become far more wary of these huge storms.
Now extreme measures are taken to avoid another catastrophe.
Exactly one year to the day before Cyclone Hudhud barrelled into the coast of Andhra Pradesh, another storm had slammed into India.
This storm was called Phailin (pronounced Pi-leen) and was the strongest storm to hit India since the 1999 Odisha Cyclone.
In fact it was only slightly weaker than the Odisha Cyclone, with sustained winds of well over 200kph (125 mph) as the storm bore down on the coast.
The shorter life span of Cyclone Phailin and the slightly weaker wind speed ensured that the storm surge wasn’t as strong as that triggered by the Odisha Cyclone.
A surge of 3.5 metres (11.5 feet) was reported in some coastal locations, mercifully less than the eight metres (26.2 feet) storm surge that was caused by the Odisha Cyclone.
The smaller storm surge no-doubt saved lives, but so did the pre-emptive measures taken by the government.
Major evacuations of the coastal districts took place, with some people reporting that as many as 800,000 people were evacuated, which was believed to be the country’s largest evacuation on record. Only 45 people are known to have been killed by Cyclone Phailin, which is a drastic improvement from the 10,000 who were killed by the Odisha Cyclone.
The government earned worldwide acclaim, including a citation from a UN body, for its management of Phailin and the preparations for Cyclone Hudhud were just as rigorous.
Over 500,000 people were evacuated from their homes in Andhra Pradesh and with precautions like this in force, the chances of not being killed by a devastating storm of this magnitude are greatly increased.
