The strongest cyclone to hit India in five years killed at least 12 people in eastern Odisha state before swinging north-eastwards into Bangladesh on Saturday where five more people died and more than a million were moved to safety, Trend reports citing Reuters.
Tropical cyclone Fani, which made landfall early on Friday, lost some of its power and was downgraded to a ‘Depression’ by the India Meteorological Department on Saturday as the storm hovered over Bangladesh.
“The fear of a major disaster is mostly over as (Fani) has weakened,” Shamsuddin Ahmed, director of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department, told reporters.
A storm surge still breached embankments to submerge dozens of villages on Bangladesh’s low-lying coast, a disaster ministry official in Dhaka said.
The storm also destroyed several houses in the Noakhali district, where a two-year-old child and a 12-year-old girl were killed and about 30 people were injured, local official Tanmoy Das told Reuters.
In all at least five people had been killed, 63 injured, and more than the 1,000 houses had been damaged, Bangladeshi authorities said.
In India, authorities were assessing damage left behind by Fani, which had spent days building power over the northern reaches of the Bay of Bengal before tearing into Odisha.
Indian media reported that at least 12 people had died across the state, with most deaths caused by falling trees, but a mass evacuation before the tropical cyclone made landfall averted a greater loss of life.