BHUBANESHWAR, India - The death toll in a giant cyclone that tore across eastern India could run into thousands, the chief minister of the coastal state of Orissa said.
"It could be thousands," Giridhar Gamang said in the state capital Bhubaneshwar. Sea water up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) deep has inundated the coast as far as 15 kilometers (9 miles) inland from the port of Paradwip.
..... In New Delhi, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said 1.5 million people are homeless because of the cyclone. "It is being treated as a national calamity," he said.
Orissa state officials said between 200,000 to 300,000 houses had been damaged.
..... The cyclone, packing winds of 250 km/h (155 mph) crossed Paradwip early Friday. By Saturday, it weakened as it moved inland, dumping heavy rain on much of northern India, Bangladesh and parts of Myanmar, said R.R. Kelkar, director- general of the Indian Meteorological Department.
The cyclone was 30 kilometers (20 miles) northeast of Bhubaneswar, early Saturday morning, Kelkar said. Its winds had dropped to about 60-70 km/h (36-42 mph).
The cyclone uprooted trees, knocked down utility poles and flooded large parts of the coast. Tidal waves 4 to 5 meters (13 to 15 feet) high hammered the coast.
This is not an ordinary cyclone," said Kelkar. "This is a supercyclone," he told a news conference in New Delhi.
Even the national weather bureau was blinded when its satellite warning system was destroyed.
Only two weeks ago, another cyclone battered Orissa, killing 100 people and injuring 1,000.
More than a dozen cyclones form every year in the Bay of Bengal, but this one had grown since it originated October 25 in the middle of the bay.
"Cyclones that develop near the coast don't have time to intensify," Kelkar said.
India recorded cyclones of similar intensity in 1990, 1989 and in 1977, he said. The cyclone in 1977 killed an estimated 10,000 people in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.
[Excerpted from CNN, November 4, 1999]
..... Cyclones strike India's coasts every year, and the poor are often their chief victims.
Last year, a cyclone and tidal wave in western India swept away up to 14,000 people -- many of them destitute salt workers who lived beside the Arabian Sea. In 1997, a storm submerged entire villages with 20-foot-high tidal waves, killing 3,000 people.
In 1968, a cyclone that whipped out of the Bay of Bengal further north in 1968 and slammed into the teeming city of Calcutta is said to have left half a million people homeless.
[Excerpted from CNN, November 11, 1999]
..... "The death toll has risen to 7,474, with 6,383 deaths reported from Jagatsinghpur district," said an official from the relief commissioner's office.
The official total represents the number of bodies that have actually been counted, but Red Cross officials said the number -- including the bodies of victims burned before officials could count them -- is surely over 10,000 and still rising.
The deadly cyclone struck the Indian coast on October 29 with wind gusts up to 300 kilometers (190 miles) per hour. An estimated 10 million people lost their homes, livestock or livelihood, and many were dying of starvation and disease.
Much of the increase in the death toll came from the town of Ersama, 270 miles south of Calcutta, where soldiers fanning out from the town in boats found 1,500 bodies still floating in water by the side of the road.