Cyclone Fani made landfall on India's eastern coast on Friday as a grade 5 storm, lashing beaches with rain and wind gusting up to 205 kilometres per hour.
The India Meteorological Department said the "extremely severe" cyclone in the Bay of Bengal hit the coastal state of Odisha around 8 a.m., and was forecast to weaken to a "very severe" storm as it moved north-northeast toward the Indian state of West Bengal.
The national highway to Puri, a popular tourist beach city, was littered with fallen trees and electricity poles, making it impassable. A special train ran Thursday to evacuate tourists from the city. On India's cyclone scale, Fani is the second-most severe, equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane. A 1999 "super" cyclone that killed around 10,000 people and devastated large parts of Odisha reached wind speeds of 260-280 kph per hour, according to the Meteorological Department's scientist Dr. M. Mohapatra.Around 1.2 million people were evacuated from low-lying areas of Odisha and moved to nearly 4,000 shelters, according to India's National Disaster Response Force.
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