Surviving cyclone Fani — A reporter’s account of a catastrophic cyclone in summer.
Debabrata Mohanty
The alarm of the mobile phone chimed at 5 am, but I slept through till the second one rang at 5.30 am abruptly waking me up. My wife had woken up while my kids kept sleeping in another room.
Cyclone Fani(literally meaning the hood of a snake), had not arrived at Puri as yet and I was still 65 km away from the Ground Zero. I was getting late. I had to arrive at Puri before 8 am, the scheduled landfall time of Fani.
After finishing my morning chores I peered outside. The trees were not swaying as menacingly as I thought. But the sky had turned ashen and conveyed the foreboding of something sinister. It had started drizzling.
The previous 3 days of forecasting had however made it certain. Odisha lied in the direct path of cyclone Fani, the strongest tropical cyclone to hit the eastern India in 43 years during summer. The last one had hit the Andhra Pradesh coast in April 1976.
I’ve witnessed tropical cyclones before. In October 2013, I was in Chhatrapur town of Ganjam district when cyclone Phailin made landfall about 15 km away. I felt the brute force of the cyclone minutes before the eye passed through and then the temporary lull followed by the rampaging wind. In the relative safety of the Ganjam district collector’s office, I could hear the ear-shattering sound of Phailin’s wind as it tossed around billboards, vehicles and trees like matchboxes. In 1999, when the super cyclone tore though Bhubaneswar for over a day, I had tried venturing out only to be thrown off my feet every second. The brute force of cyclone can be the most humbling experience of life.
By the time I set off for Puri at 6.30 am, the breeze was slowly becoming gale and the coconut trees along the picturesque NH-316 connecting Bhubaneswar to Puri swayed a little too fast and people were running for covers. When I reached Puri at 7.45 a.m, the first signs of Fani’s imminent landfall were all too evident. A huge tree had been uprooted blocking the entire breadth of VIP Road. A few policemen clad in raincoats were still trying to weather the storm as they stood on the busy square. A scooter rider with a man on his pillion passed me by. The Grand Road leading to the temple was empty. I tried shooting the scene outside through my mobile phone camera, but gave up as rains started coming in thick and fast through the car window.
When I arrived at the sea beach, the waves were rising, a little higher than what they appear in morning. Just behind our car, a chunk of plastic flied past the car window. The sea looked smoky. I thought it was time to retreat to a safer ground before the debris started flying around.
The PWD inspection bungalow on the Puri sea beach, a beachfront government guest house started in the 80s, became my safe haven. Situated next to the special circuit house, the bungalow is less than 40 metre away from the beach and offered a clear view of the sea from its rooftop. Around half a dozen people including me, my driver and our photographer were inside the IB when Fani started barreling down.
The winds began blowing from the northeastern part of the sea. For the first 15 minutes, the wind was not very violent but strong enough to topple the flower pots near the portico. Soon the winds started blowing harder, and I watched tin signboards battering against the wall. One moment, the wind would come raging like a madman whistling long and shrill and the next moment it would be little calm. But the next gust of wind would be fiercer and ram against the building. I checked my mobile. The Internet connectivity was gone.
By 9 am, water had started gushing into the rooms of PWD IB. The marbled staircases had now turned into streams. The glass panes of the window were broken and shards were lying all around. The mattresses were all wet. Water was now ankle-deep. I tried going up the staircase to the roof. It was near-impossible to look through the wall of mist that stood between the building and the sea while the winds battered the corrugated sheets on the roof. A few started flying around. Any thought of opening the grille and venture to the roof was swiftly shut.
Carefully treading through the staircase littered with glass shards, I went down to the lobby and pulled out a chair. The coconut trees were swaying furiously and the green coconuts had started falling down. Quite a few had been broken at the top. From outside the IB, the cacophony of billboards and signages flying and banging against buildings and roads continued. The wind hissed like an angry python one moment. The next moment it would retreat and recoil only to strike back with a greater ferocity. When I was thinking all was well with the building, the left side glass panel of the lobby caved in under the wind speed and broke. The right one too swayed and not long before it too fell throwing glass shards all around the floor. That the wind had not lost any of its force was evident from the way the stems of a coconut tree were wrenched away.
If I thought the worst was over, I was to be proved wrong soon. Around 10.30 am, the last quadrant of the cyclone seemed to pass over the town and the wind suddenly had a force of its own. I peered into one room to find winds shattering the glass window panes through which salty seawater kept spraying. The scene was similar in several rooms where doors broke and plastic chairs were tossed around. It was difficult to sit still as the cyclone pumped in salty water through the vents and ducts flooding all the rooms. The atmosphere seemed contaminated with the pungent taste of salt.
Numbed by the wind’s ferocity I sat still in one of the rooms waiting for the cyclone to lose its fire. Water lapped around my sneakers. I got up and put my laptop bag on the chair. In the basement, two stray dogs looked for a safe place to hide. The last quadrant of Fani was probably more ferocious than the front quadrant. But now the winds were coming from the exact opposite direction. Instead of coming in from the northeast, the winds now came from the southwest due to the cyclone’s rotation.
By 12, Fani had spent most of its fury. the sky and wind progressively lightened and I ventured out. There was little rain, but sand blew from the beach along the sea beach road towards the statue of Vivekananda. The sand storm continued for over half an hour stinging anyone on its path. The pavement and the road on sea beach road were levelled out with sand in no time. The scores of hotels along the sea beach, many of which had their front doors smashed to smithereens were awash with sand. There were more sand dunes on the sea beach road than on the beach.
The circuit house looked like as if it was bombed out during an air raid as the rooms were filled with glass shards and debris. The district collector and SP’s officials residences were totally ravaged as the the winds blew the roofs and demolished the boundary walls. A mentally-challenged man sat naked under a statue, shivering furiously, probably shaken by the wind while a mobile tower erected over a hotel roof was wrenched away and battered.
Outside, people had started looting soft drinks, chocolates, CCTV cameras, biscuits and gas cylinders of roadside shops and eateries. Officer-in-charge of the meterological office on Puri sea beach, Hrusikesh Panda looked shaken as the anemometer in the office showed cyclone gusts around 148 knots(around 274 km per hour).
It was a super cyclone!
Inside the town, roads were blocked with fallen trees and moving around was difficult. The entrance to the district collector’s office was blocked by a huge fallen tree. Not a single tree stood erect in Puri Raj Bhawan next door. For next few hours I went around the town negotiating fallen trees and wrenched out electric poles while frantically searching for some mobile signal so that I could inform my bosses about the destruction caused by Fani. At Jagannath temple, people gathered around a fallen image near the temple and spoke animatedly about how the flag atop the temple that had torn a day before the cyclone’s landfall portended to ominous things. A few others talked about how the cyclone was Lord Jagannath’s way of retribution for the “mismanagement” of the 12th century temple.
Two weeks later, I am still discovering newer and newer damages such as a tossed out television set on the road, galvanised tin sheets stuck to electric lines, broken electric poles and mobile towers twisted in a strangely demonic fashion.
Miles away from Puri, my family in Bhubaneswar got off easy compared to others. Power supply did not resume for about a week. But I still had a house, with a roof, windows, and running water. Power supply resumed to a large part of Bhubaneswar within the first 10 days of the cyclone. But lakhs of villagers, fishermen, farmers, poultry businessmen, daily wagers and students have lost everything and are still without power. Their homes and shops have been destroyed and many may not be able to get back their livelihood for several months. Having lost their near and dear many are still valiantly trying to put their body and soul back together.
Hatia Jena, a smalltime trader of Batagon village just outside Puri lost two of his shops that were violently flung around and broken to pieces. School student Rajani Pradhan of Rebana Nuagaon village is unsure if she can continue her studies as her bamboo and straw hut lies speradeagled on the ground knocked down by the blow of Fani.
Seshadeba Nayak, a farmer in Kuapada lost his speech-and-hearing challenged daughter Payal to the deathwinds after the walls of his kitchen caved in on her while they were rushing through the breakfast. Others like Sonali and Nirmal Maharana of Brahmagiri town became proud parents when Sonali gave birth to a girl inside their decrepit Maruti 800 car as doctors Pranab Prakash and Rakesh Pradhan soothed her fraying nerves all the while using a battery-powered torch for some light.
In one village that I visited a few days ago, a Dalit victim started howling at me for having missed out on his relief package of 50 kg rice. “Where is my 50 kg? The wardmember has surely gobbled it up. Write my name,” he insisted. It will be several months before some of them achieve any sense of normality.
On May 3, nature won comprehensively against Odisha. The people and the State government have taken battering in their stride while trying to rise like a Phoenix. But this won’t sure be the last of the nature’s fury against the coastal State.