2.6m people flee as Cyclone Amphan batters India and Bangladesh

Cyclone Amphan, the equivalent of a category-3 hurricane, was packing winds of up to 105mph and maximum gusts of 118mph.

Authorities warned it could cause extensive damage to flimsy houses and a storm surge may push sea water 15 miles inland, flooding cities including Kolkata.

Coconut trees swayed wildly, electric poles lay scattered on the roads of Kolkata, rain pounded fishing villages, and rivers surged as the storm battered coastal areas. Thousands of homes were damaged and river embankments were washed away.

“The next 24 hours are very crucial. This is a long haul,” said India’s meteorological chief.

The region, with 58 million people in the two bordering countries, has some of the most vulnerable communities in South Asia: poor fishing communities in the Sunderbans and more than a million Rohingya refugees living in crowded camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

A woman crushed by a tree and a 13-year-old girl killed near Kolkata were among the first deaths reported in India. In southern Bangladesh, a volunteer in a cyclone preparedness team drowned when a boat capsized in a canal.

The cyclone could endanger India’s fight against coronavirus, with supply lines cut, roads destroyed and lockdown measures slowing relief work, said a health systems consultant in India.

The cyclone began to make landfall between Digha, a seaside resort in West Bengal, and Hatiya Islands in Bangladesh. The eye of the storm is likely to pass through the Sunderbans, one of the largest mangrove forests in the world, according to India’s meteorological department.

The forests could act as a vital line of defence by dissipating some of the energy from the waves that would otherwise crash into the coastline, said KJ Ramesh, the department’s former chief.

Bangladesh is attempting to evacuate 2.2 million people to safety. India’s West Bengal state moved nearly 300,000 and Odisha state another 148,486 people, officials said.

In Cox’s Bazar, where the first 10 coronavirus cases were confirmed last week, authorities and UN workers prepared 50 shelters and assigned 256 volunteer units.

Areas at risk of landslides were stabilised with bamboo and concrete walls. But the combination of the virus and cyclone could lead to a “new humanitarian crisis”, said Manuel Pereira, deputy chief of mission for the International Organisation for Migration in Bangladesh.

“We know that if people are forced to seek communal shelter, they’ll be unable to maintain physical distancing and run the risk of contracting or transmitting the virus,” said Mr Pereira.

Masks and hand sanitisers were hastily added to emergency items in the shelters.

Sobrato Das, a fisherman in Mousuni Island in India, close to the Sunderbans, described the shelters as crowded and said “very few people are wearing masks”.

He said children were crying and women desperately tried to cover their faces with their saris while trying to maintain some distance from each other.

“I have left all my belongings in my house and hope it doesn’t get washed away in the floods,” he said.

Some cyclone shelters in West Bengal were being used for quarantining Covid-19 patients and migrant workers returning to their homes. The state government asked for trains transporting migrants to be suspended, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said. Some schools were turned into shelters.

Some in the cyclone’s path saw a choice between the virus and the storm.

In the seaside resort of Digha, many people feared going to the shelters, said fisherman Debasis Shyamal.

“They have been home for weeks, and are afraid of going into a crowd where they could get infected,” he said.

The densely populated city of Kolkata, which has nearly 1,500 coronavirus cases, is likely to see flooding, while some centuries-old buildings in the northern half of the city could collapse due to the strong winds, officials warned.

The cyclone is bearing down during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, and some Bangladeshis who fasted during the day reportedly waited until the early morning hours before heading for the shelters.