Cyclone Fani slammed into India on Friday, killing at least eight people as winds of up to 150 mph lashed beaches, uprooted trees and forced the evacuation of more than 1 million people.
The storm struck near the city of Puri, in Odisha state, and was expected to weaken as it moved toward the city of Kolkata, home to some 4.5 million people, according to CNN.
On India’s cyclone scale, Fani – “snake” in Bengali — is the second-most severe — equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane.
Eight people were reported killed, according to the Times of India, including a teenage boy and a woman hit by concrete debris.
“Around 160 people were injured in Puri alone. Our relief work is ongoing,” Odisha disaster management official Prabhat Mahapatra told AFP.
The winds were felt as far away as Mount Everest — about 1,430 miles from where Fani hit the eastern coast — with tents blown away at a camp roughly 21,000 feet high, officials said.
About 1.2 million people were evacuated from low-lying areas and moved to about 4,000 shelters, according to India’s National Disaster Response Force.
The navy, air force, army and coast guard have been on high alert in what Odisha Special Relief Commissioner Bishnupada Sethi called an evacuation effort unprecedented in the country.
Authorities in Bangladesh, where Fani was headed, said a woman was killed by a tree and that 14 villages were flooded as dams broke due to a tidal surge.
Disaster management spokesman Mohammad Jahir said 400,000 people from Bangladeshi coastal villages were taken to shelters.
In Bhubaneswar, a city in Odisha famous for an 11th-century Hindu temple, trees whipped back and forth violently and the national highway to Puri, a popular tourist beach city, was littered with debris.
“It was a massive cyclone, like many others our house is flooded. Boundary walls of houses around us have collapsed, trees have been uprooted. It is a panic situation,” Anuradha Mohanty, a Bhubaneswar resident, told Reuters.
At the height of the storm, meanwhile, a baby was born in Bhubaneswar.
“We are calling her Lady Fani,” a spokesperson for the hospital told the Press Trust of India.
The National Disaster Response Force sent 54 rescue and relief teams of doctors, engineers and divers to flood-prone areas along the coast and as far as Andaman and Nicobar islands about 840 miles east of mainland India in the Bay of Bengal.
On Mount Everest, some mountaineers and Sherpa guides were descending to lower camps as conditions at higher elevations deteriorated.
Hundreds of climbers and guides huddled at the base camp, according to Pemba Sherpa of the Xtreme Climbers Trek, who said weather and visibility was poor.
May is the best month to climb the 29,035-foot Everest when Nepal experiences a few windows of good weather.
“It is still the beginning of the month, so there is no reason for climbers to worry” that weather from the storm will prevent them from reaching the summit, Sherpa said.
Fani’s timing is unusual, according to data from the Meteorological Department.
Most extremely severe cyclones hit India’s east coast in the post-monsoon season. Over roughly half a century, 23 cyclones, or almost 60 percent of those that hit the country, were observed between October and December.
Because Fani spent 10 days gathering strength over water, it delivered a massive blow when it made landfall.
In 1999, a “super” cyclone killed around 10,000 people and devastated large parts of Odisha.
With Post Wires