Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated along India's eastern coast on Thursday as authorities braced for a cyclone moving through the Bay of Bengal that was forecast to bring extremely severe wind and rain.
The India Meteorological Department in New Delhi said Cyclone Fani was expected to make landfall on Friday with gale-force winds of up to 124 miles per hour likely starting Thursday night. It warned of"extremely heavy falls" over parts of the state of Odisha and its southern neighbor Andhra Pradesh.India's National Disaster Management Authority forecast"high to phenomenal" sea conditions for most of the Indian states along the Bay of Bengal.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with Cabinet ministers and weather and disaster-response officials for a briefing on the measures being taken. Odisha's special relief commissioner, Bishnupada Sethi, said that preparations for Fani included the country's largest evacuation operation, affecting around 880,000 people."We've been preparing plans for the last few days to ensure that all the people who are vulnerable will be shifted to our cyclone centers," Sethi said.
The National Disaster Response Force dispatched 54 rescue and relief teams to flood-prone areas along the coast and as far afield as Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a group of islands that comprise a state located about 840 miles east of mainland India in the Bay of Bengal.
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