The
Eastern Indian city of Kolkata has been devastated by a powerful cyclone which
has killed at least 22 people across India and Bangladesh.
Storm
Amphan struck coastal areas with ferocious wind and rainfall.
Thousands of trees were uprooted in the gales, electricity and telephone lines brought down and houses flattened.
Many
of Kolkata’s roads were flooded and its 14 million people without power.
The
storm is the first super cyclone to form in the Bay of Bengal since 1999, though
its winds had weakened by the time it struck, it was still classified as a very
severe cyclone.
Coronavirus restrictions have been hindering emergency and relief efforts while social-distancing measures made mass evacuations more difficult.
Amphan
began hitting the Sundarbans, a mangrove area around the India-Bangladesh
border, home to four million people on Wednesday afternoon, before carving
north and north-eastwards towards Kolkata, a historic city that was the capital
of the British Raj.
In
Bangladesh, the worst-affected district was Satkhira, where large areas have
been flooded as embankments collapsed in several places.
Initial
assessments of the damage are being hampered by blocked roads and flooding in
all these areas.