Cyclone Biparjoy made landfall in northwestern India on Thursday, bringing violent gusts of wind and impressive waves to the Indian and Pakistani coasts.
More than 175,000 people have been preventively moved from the area that Biparjoy must in principle cross, in the face of the risk of flooding and the anticipated “total destruction” of certain buildings.
Biparjoy, which means “disaster” in Bengali, hit the coast of the Indian state of Gujarat, accompanied by winds of 125 km / h and gusts reaching 140 km / h at 6:30 p.m. (1:30 p.m. GMT), according to the service bulletin Indian weather.
Strong winds, storm surges (rising sea levels) and torrential rains threaten some 325 kilometers of coastline between Mandvi, in the Indian state of Gujarat, and the Karachi region, the main city of Pakistan.
Jayantha Bhai, a 35-year-old shopkeeper from the Indian seaside town of Mandvi, told AFP on Thursday morning of his fears for the safety of his family. “It’s the first time I’ve been confronted with a cyclone,” said the father of three boys aged eight to fifteen, who planned to shut himself up in his small concrete house leaning against his shop.
“It’s nature, we can’t fight against it,” he admits in the pouring rain. In the afternoon, lower roads began to flood in Mandvi, where almost all shops closed.
The meteorological agencies of India and Pakistan predict “a very violent cyclone”.
In India, the Gujarat government said 94,000 people had left coastal and low-lying areas to take shelter elsewhere.
In Pakistan, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman announced that 82,000 people had been evacuated from southeastern coastal areas.
“Our worst fear is that it (the cyclone) will arrive tonight or at night,” Jaffer Ali, 20, told AFP in the fishing village of Zero Point, near the border. with India.
The few hundred thatched-roof dwellings have almost all been deserted and only wild cats and dogs still inhabit this locality, where a hundred fishing boats are anchored along a pier.
“We are afraid of what is coming,” admits Jaffer Ali.
On Wednesday, Ms. Rehman told the press that it was a cyclone “like Pakistan has never seen”.
Many of the areas affected are those that were flooded during last year’s disastrous monsoon. This had plunged a third of Pakistan under water, damaging two million houses and causing the death of more than 1,700 people.
“It’s all the result of climate change,” said Ms. Rehman.
The waves could reach a height of four meters, risking flooding part of the megacity of Karachi, which is home to around 20 million people.
On Wednesday evening, a short distance from the Indian port of Jakhau, around 200 people from Kutch district gathered in a small, single-storey health centre. Many people here worried about the livestock left behind on their farms.
Dhal Jetheeben Ladhaji, a pharmacist, said about 10 men remained behind to care for hundreds of animals vital to the community’s livelihood.
“We are terrified, we don’t know what will happen next,” Mr. Ladhaji, 40, told AFP.
Cyclones are frequent in this region of the Indian Ocean, where tens of millions of people live. But scientists explain that these phenomena are gaining power due to global warming.
One of them, climatologist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology Roxy Mathew Koll, told AFP that cyclones draw their energy from warm waters and that surface temperatures in the Arabian Sea , also known as the Arabian Sea, were 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Celsius higher than four decades ago.
“The rapid warming of the Arabian Sea, coupled with global warming, tends to increase heat flux from the ocean to the atmosphere and promote more intense cyclones,” he summarized.
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15/06/2023 17:00:14 — Jakhau (Inde) (AFP) © 2023 AFP