Gales lash India and Pakistan coast as cyclone approaches

AFP :
Howling gales and crashing waves pounded the coastline of India and Pakistan on Thursday, hours before the landfall of a powerful cyclone that has prompted mass evacuations.
More than 175,000 people have fled the predicted path of Cyclone Biparjoy, which means “disaster” in Bengali, with Indian meteorologists warning it could devastate homes and tear down power lines when it lands around 1200 GMT.
The United States’ Joint Typhoon Warning Center forecast the eye of the cyclone would hit the coast of India’s Gujarat state, before tracking northeast into Pakistan’s Sindh province.
Powerful winds and storm surges were forecast to hammer a 325-kilometre (200-mile) stretch of coast between the megacity of Karachi in Pakistan and the Gujarat coastal settlement of Mandvi.
Jayantha Bhai, a 35-year-old shopkeeper in the beach town, told AFP on Thursday he was afraid for his family’s safety.
“This is the first time I’ve experienced a cyclone,” said Bhai, a father of three boys aged between eight and 15, who planned to wait out the cyclone in his small concrete home behind the shop. “This is nature, we can’t fight with it,” he said as driving rain lashed his home.
Low-lying roads started to flood on Thursday afternoon after hours of rainfall. Gusting winds earlier blew sheets of water that reduced visibility to a dull grey mist.
Almost all shops were closed, and shoppers had crowded the few that remained open to buy last-minute food and water supplies.
India’s Meteorological Department predicted the “very severe” storm would hit near the Indian port of Jakhau on Thursday evening, warning of “total destruction” of traditional mud and straw thatched homes.
At sea, winds were gusting at up to 180 kilometres per hour (112 miles per hour), with speeds predicted to reach 115-125 kph and gusts of up to 140 kph by the time it makes landfall.
India’s meteorologists warned of the potential for “widespread damage”, including the destruction of crops, “bending or uprooting of power and communication poles” and disruption of railways and roads.
In India, the Gujarat state government said 94,000 people had relocated from coastal and low-lying areas to shelter.
Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman said around 82,000 people had been moved from southeastern coastal areas, with landfall expected after darkness falls.
“Our worst fears are that it will come in the evening or later tonight,” said Jaffer Ali in the largely abandoned fishing town of Zero Point — so-called because of its proximity to the Indian border.
The shanty settlement of hundreds of thatched homes was populated mainly by stray cats and wild dogs, with at least a hundred idle fishing boats tethered to a long pier running out to the ocean.
“We are afraid of what is coming,” 20-year-old Ali told AFP.
On Wednesday, Rehman said the coming storm was “a cyclone the likes of which Pakistan has never experienced”.
Many of the areas affected are the same inundated in last year’s catastrophic monsoon floods, which put a third of Pakistan underwater, damaging two million homes and killing more than 1,700 people.
“These are all results of climate change,” Rehman told reporters.
Storm surges were expected to reach four metres (13 feet), with flooding possible in Karachi — home to about 20 million people — and commercial flights about to be grounded.
About 200 people huddled together in a single-storey health centre in Kutch district, a short distance from India’s Jakhau port, late on Wednesday.
Many were worried about their farm animals, which they had left behind.
Dhal Jetheeben Ladhaji, 40, a pharmacist at the health centre, said 10 men had stayed behind to look after hundreds of cattle crucial to their village’s livelihood.
“We are terrified, we don’t know what will happen next,” Ladhaji said.
Cyclones — the equivalent of hurricanes in the North Atlantic or typhoons in the Northwest Pacific — are a regular and deadly menace on the coast of the northern Indian Ocean, where tens of millions of people live.
Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer with climate change.
Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, said cyclones derive their energy from warm waters, and that surface temperatures in the Arabian Sea were 1.2 to 1.4 degrees Celsius warmer than four decades ago.