Indian Navy helicopters yesterday scoured the sea for 89 people missing after a major cyclone slammed India, adding to the country’s woes as it suffered a record number of COVID-19 deaths.
Pummeling the western coast late on Monday, Cyclone Tauktae was the latest in what experts say is a growing number of ever-bigger storms in the Arabian Sea because of climate change warming its waters.
The Indian Ministry of Defense yesterday said that navy ships had rescued more than 600 people after waves up to 8m high hammered offshore oil installations.
Photo: AFP
However, planes and helicopters were still searching for 89 workers missing from one of several support vessels that slipped its moorings in the storm and sank.
M.K. Jha, head of the Indian Naval Western Command, said that the sea was so rough that they could not board life rafts.
Those rescued have “hope in their eyes, but certainly they are distressed ... they have been battered by the sea conditions for multiple hours,” Jha told the NDTV news channel.
Even before the cyclone made landfall in Gujarat State with gusts up to 185kph, associated heavy rains and strong winds killed about 20 people in western and southern India.
Once the storm hit, the death toll rose to at least 33, including a child crushed by a collapsing wall, an 80-year-old woman killed by a falling pole and a teenage girl by a crumbling roof.
“I have never experienced such intensity in my life,” said a hotel owner in the town of Bhavnagar, where the winds smashed windows on the seafront, and sent trees and power lines toppling.
More than 16,500 houses were damaged, 40,000 trees were uprooted and engineers were working to restore power to hundreds of thousands of people.
There were also fears that at least 18 lions were missing in Gujarat, home to India’s only surviving Asiatic lions, as well thousands of other animals and birds, reports said.
Although the cyclone was one of the fiercest in decades, better forecasting than in previous disasters meant that 200,000 people in danger zones — including hundreds of COVID-19 patients — were moved to safety.
The deadly weather system hit as India’s healthcare system struggled with a coronavirus surge that in the past 24 hours killed a record 4,529 people.
“This is one of the most powerful cyclones we’ve faced in India for decades, and after weeks of chaos and devastating loss of life caused by COVID-19, it could not have come at a worse time,” said Santanu Chakraborty of the charity Save the Children.
“Thousands of children and their families have lost their homes and their livelihoods, and the damage caused to roads and infrastructure will put even more pressure on local administrations already struggling to cope with the fallout from the pandemic,” Chakraborty said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion