Cyclone Yaas batters India’s eastern coast: deaths reported as homes destroyed and airports close (VIDEOS)

Cyclone Yaas has made landfall in Odisha State, bringing heavy rain and winds of up to 140kph (87mph) and causing widespread damage across eastern India, destroying homes, flooding villages, and disrupting transport.

On Wednesday morning, Cyclone Yaas made landfall near Balasore, the largest city of northern Odisha. The “very severe cyclonic storm” is expected to continue moving inland, petering out as it moves towards Varanasi, India’s spiritual capital. 

The storm has brought heavy rains and winds of up to 140kph (87mph). Sizeable waves have also battered low-lying coastal areas, with many villages and fishing communities flooded. Low-lying areas of Sagar Island, in the Bay of Bengal, have been particularly affected, as has the tourist town of Digha, where a police station was flooded. 

Videos show a hotel in Mandarmani, just east of Digha, badly damaged by the storm, with guest rooms left roofless and the grounds flooded. 

A local official told Al Jazeera that one person had died after a tree fell on them in Panchupalli village in Odisha, and a 15-year-old boy was found dead by a National Disaster Response Force team in Jagannath Khunta. 

The airport in Kolkata, West Bengal’s capital, has been closed, as has the airport in Odisha’s capital Bhubaneswar. 

Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, told reporters that around 20,000 mud houses and shelters had been damaged by the storm. Furthermore, a tornado that preceded the storm’s landfall had killed two people as it tore through the state. Several tornados, both on land and at sea, have been caught on camera by local residents. 

“I have not seen anything like this before,” said another state minister, Bankim Hazra. The two states had brought in nearly 5,000 disaster workers to prepare the area and deal with the predicted devastation caused by Cyclone Yaas. 

The storm comes a week after India’s west coast was battered by Cyclone Tauktae. More than 100 people were killed as the storm, the worst seen in decades, swept across Gujarat. It also hit an offshore oilfield off Mumbai, where a total of 86 crew members and oil workers died.

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