BHUBANESWAR, India — Coastal evacuation in Andhra Pradesh gets under way Monday evening, officials said. Out over the Bay of Bengal, Cyclone Arnab is moving toward land. Landfall is expected Wednesday morning.
On Monday morning the India Meteorological Department raised the deep depression over the bay to a cyclonic storm and named it Arnab. By Monday midnight the department expects a severe cyclonic storm, and a very severe one on Tuesday.
At 5:30 a.m. on Monday it lay centred over the east-central Bay of Bengal, next to the west-central bay, about 650 kilometers east-southeast of Visakhapatnam, the bulletin said. It was moving nearly westwards at about 15 kph.
The department’s cyclone warning, its red message, covers Andhra Pradesh and the adjoining South Odisha coast. Wednesday’s crossing is forecast between Bapatla and Visakhapatnam. That stretch takes in the Andhra Pradesh coast and Yanam. At the coast, the forecast top sustained winds run 115 to 125 kph. Gusts may reach 140 kph.
Rain, heavy in places and at times extremely heavy, is forecast for Andhra Pradesh’s northern and central coastal districts and for the south of Odisha.
In Andhra Pradesh, officials have told boats at sea to return to shore and ordered crews to restore power quickly if the storm knocks it out. A senior disaster management official told Reuters the state has identified 570,000 people as vulnerable, and evacuations were set to start on Monday evening.
Prakhar Jain, managing director of the Andhra Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority, has appealed to people to follow safety precautions, warning that the next three days will be extremely critical. Strong winds could start hitting coastal areas as early as Tuesday morning, he said.
Next door in Odisha, the government has closed schools and colleges in five districts for Tuesday and Wednesday. It is also preparing to move people living in low-lying areas into cyclone shelters.
The Bay of Bengal is one of the world’s major regions for tropical cyclones, and storms there have a long record of flooding coastal districts when they come ashore.
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