A tropical storm weakened after dumping heavy rain overnight in parts of southern India off the Bay of Bengal as more than 50,000 people evacuated to government-run camps, officials said yesterday.
No loss of life or major damage had been reported from the rain-hit areas of Andhra Pradesh.
Kanna Babu, a state commissioner for disaster management, said that 54,000 people who evacuated on Friday from vulnerable areas were waiting in nearly 200 state-run relief camps for the weather to clear before returning to their homes.
Authorities shut schools, canceled trains and anchored fishing boats in the affected areas until today.
The storm was likely to further weaken and curve toward Odisha state before making landfall today as a deep depression, the Indian Meteorological Department said.
“The Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea are now warmer compared to earlier decades because of climate change,” said K.J. Ramesh, one of India’s top meteorologists and a former head of the weather agency.
Storms were also forming simultaneously as a result of climate change over the past decade — a phenomenon that was rare in the past, Ramesh said.
In May, two storms hit India within 10 days, with Cyclone Tauktae killing at least 140 people across western states.
Nearly 70 of those who were killed were on a barge that ripped free of its anchors and sank off Mumbai’s coast.
In May last year, nearly 100 people died in Cyclone Amphan, the most powerful storm to hit eastern India in more than a decade.
It flattened villages, destroyed farms and left millions without power in eastern India and Bangladesh.
Some of the deadliest tropical cyclones on record have occurred in the Bay of Bengal.
A 1999 cyclone killed about 10,000 people and devastated large parts of Odisha.
Due to improved forecasts and better-coordinated disaster management, the death toll from Cyclone Phailin, an equally intense storm that hit in 2013, was less than 50, the World Meteorological Organization said.
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