Cyclone Makes More Than a Million Homeless...10/31/99

A fierce cyclone cut off a vast section of eastern India on Saturday, knocking out power and telephone lines and flattening thousands of homes. Officials feared hundreds of people may be dead.

A day after the cyclone roared in from the Bay of Bengal, the area was still inaccessible and all communications were severed.

Villagers poured out of the hinterlands, fighting whiplash rain as they herded their cattle with them to seek high ground and shelter.Edeadly cyclone in less than two weeks to devastate the coast in the Indian state of Orissa.

Rescue operations were thwarted as the storm continued to pound the area for the second day without letup. Air force helicopters and ground troops, loaded with food packets, waited for a break in the weather.

The highway leading south from this town on the state border with West Bengal were littered with fallen eucalyptus trees and swamped with water. Long lines of trucks lined up on the roadside.

Local reports said two-thirds of Baleshwar district was submerged. Districts further south could only be worse.

"You can't imagine the damage," Orissa state Chief Minister Giridhar Gamag said after the cyclone hit Friday. "The deaths will be not in tens, but in hundreds. " Details of casualties and damage were unavailable. Even the national weather bureau was blinded when it satellite warning system was destroyed.

Nearly 300 army engineers and doctors dispatched by land from West Bengal began rescue and relief work, Press Trust of India quoted officials as saying. On Friday, 2,000 army soldiers were flown to Bhubaneswar, Orissa's state capital, for rescue operations, it said.

"This is not an ordinary cyclone," said R. R. Kelkar, director-general of the Indian Meteorological Department. "This is a supercyclone," he told a news conference in New Delhi.