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There is a correction in this story that can be seen at the end of it.
The signs of Cyclone Hudhud's unbridled fury are visible nearly an hour before the train pulls into Visakhapatnam station if you are travelling to the port city from the south. The acres of green fields and rows of palm trees that formed the landscape till Narasingapally give way to a surreal landscape of flattened crops, uprooted trees and electrical poles that are bent, as if keening, or twisted out of shape. In the city itself, the most visible scars are the trees that have either toppled over or have been denuded of all leaves, making the once-green Visakhapatnam an arboreal graveyard. Initial reports suggest over a million trees have been damaged.
It's just over a week since Cyclone Hudhud made landfall at Visakhapatnam, and the city is slowly returning to normalcy. The endless queues at fuel stations are no longer there and the trees that fell across roads, making them impassable, have been moved. But there are enough reminders of that fateful Sunday. Nearly every hoarding has been ripped away, leaving only the frames behind. Drive by the prominent Ramakrishna Beach and you will see buildings with shattered glass, some with entire facades torn, looking like shells of their former selves.
Among the worst damaged public structures is the airport, over 20 km outside the city. Most of the roofing of the terminal, built in 2009, has been blown away, and it resembles a disaster zone. It was able to reopen only five days after the cyclone hit, and is now partially functional, with 10 flights operating currently. Small banners at various spots in the airport have photographs of the havoc that was wreaked and promise "normalcy very soon". But that is a tad optimistic. While all flights will resume in another two weeks, the extensive repair and reconstruction that would be necessary is expected to take some months, according to airport officials who request not to be named. The cost of damage is pegged at Rs 65 crore.
At the Collectorate, where Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu had camped for a week so as to oversee relief work, District Collector N Yuvaraj addresses an impromptu press conference in the 100-year-old heritage building to give an update about relief work. Initial estimates of the damages caused by the cyclone are a staggering Rs 30,000-40,000 crore, he says. A survey of the damage to houses is currently going on and the teams report that some 36,000 houses in urban areas and 58,000 in rural areas have been affected. Enumeration of agricultural losses is underway but would take time, he says. A two-member team from the Centre has just arrived to assess losses to industry. Earlier, the Andhra Pradesh Disaster Management Cell had stated that 2.96 million families in the state have been affected by the cyclone.
The power sector is among the worst hit. According to Andhra Pradesh Generation Corporation Managing Director K Vijayanand, who has also been stationed at Visakhapatnam since the midnight of October 11, damages to the sector amount to Rs 1,200 crore. Some 10,000 towers, 8,000 transformers and 25,000 poles have been damaged and over 2.4 million customers affected, says Rao. "Over 80 per cent of the work is now over." Fifteen thousand personnel had been pressed into action, including staff from the neighbouring states of Orissa and Karnataka.
Worse than expected
The common thread running through the Hudhud narrative as told by citizens, whether high-ranking official or the man on the street, is that when the cyclone finally made landfall, it was much worse than they had expected. S Prasanth, general manager of Hotel Daspalla and former vice-president of Hotels and Restaurants Association of Andhra Pradesh, gives an idea of the average citizen's response to the warnings when he says cyclone warnings have been issued frequently but people tended to joke about them because none made landfall. "I have not seen a cyclone like this in the 30 years I have been in the industry," he says. His hotel group "woke up" when TV channels reported that NASA was issuing warnings that highways should be closed. He ensured that the hotel procured enough stock, including diesel for generators, for four days and managed to weather the storm, but the hospitality industry's losses, he says, would be in the region of Rs 300 crore.
The district collector said, "The meteorological department issued warnings that the wind speed would be 180 km per hour. If we had been told it would be 220 km per hour, we could have prepared better." In fact, there are disputing figures of the actual wind speed. Visakhapatnam Port Trust Chairman M T Krishna Babu mentions that the port anemometer recorded a maximum wind speed of 279 km per hour and an average speed of 209 km per hour. However, at the Cyclone Warning Centre in the city, Director K Ramachandra Rao sticks to the India Meteorological Department (IMD) bulletin figures of 150-170 km per hour, gusting to 185 km per hour. "From the 6th onwards, we had said there was a disturbance from the Andamans and had forecast a severe cyclonic storm that would hit the city with speeds of 175 km per hour hour," says Rao, rather desultorily. He declines to comment on the difference with the Port Trust figures, only emphasising the office stood by the IMD figures.
Thus, while the warning issued seven days ago and the fact that landfall occurred on a Sunday helped in limiting the loss of life in the district to 29, there was considerable loss in other areas, where structures have been built to withstand winds of lesser intensity. For instance, one of the airport officials mentions that the new terminal had been built keeping in mind wind speeds recorded in the past few decades, which was less than the over 200 km pre hour of winds that had raged on Sunday. At Neon Motors, a five-storey dealership for Mahindra & Mahindra, it is a similar story. Though some vehicles that were outside had been parked in the cellar, the vehicles on the top floors of the glass-fronted building, including SUVs, had been left there, only to be swept all the way down by the raging winds. One damaged SUV is still lying over the boundary wall, mangled into a heap of twisted metal.
The port, too, saw losses of Rs 250 crore. Precautionary measures had included lowering cranes, putting chains and hydraulic locks on equipment to hold them in place and evacuating vessels, either to the inner harbour or deep sea, says the chairman. Interestingly, the conveyor belts at the port built 40 years ago by the Japanese and meant to withstand winds of 150 km per hour are nearly unscathed, apart from the roof being blown way. "We should really appreciate their construction and now plan for winds of 250 km per hour," he says. The port was targeting handling 63 million tonnes of cargo this fiscal but Babu says even 60 million tonnes may now be difficult.
Support from the top
Officials are appreciative of the chief minister's decision to camp in the city in his bus to supervise relief, bringing the administrative top brass with him. At King George Hospital, the biggest in the city with 1,040 beds and 30 departments, doctors in charge of administration say the health secretary and the principal secretary being stationed in the city helped cut the red tape. M Adyanarayan Chowdhury, who owns four mechanised fishing boats of which one was sunk, says Naidu being on the scene "helped 100 per cent". "No other chief minister has done something like this," says Chowdhury who is getting his other vessels repaired, which would cost him around Rs 9 lakh and take a month.
Naidu returned to the city on Wednesday for a candle-light march near the beach and exhorted citizens not to burst crackers for Diwali as the felled trees and dry leaves make the city a veritable tinder box. He also promised restoration of electricity to the entire city by the weekend, while Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised central assistance of Rs 1,000 crore.
But while the city is getting back on its feet and reconstruction is on in full swing, how prepared it will be the next time around remains a question. Indian Forest Services officer G Trinadh Kumar, who is currently joint development commissioner of the Visakhapatnam special economic zone, says the city needs to invest in coastal belt plantations which could reduce wind velocity and dissect the water so that the impact on the shore would be reduced. But Kumar, who served in the Andamans while the tsunami struck in 2004, adds, "From my experience, after six months, people forget."
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the year of tsunami as 2006 instead of 2004. The error is regretted.
