A Twister Spins Out Of Control

HIS wife had called out, inviting the family in to their mud-and-thatch hut for lunch, when farm-worker Khetra Bag saw the sky turn red and dust clouds swirling around him. Then his world turned black. There was a resounding crash, and his two teenaged sons playing outside flew out into the storm as Bag watched in horror, crouching near a haystack. A minute later, wife Kaushalya lay dead under a debris of baked mud, thatch and wood, blood oozing from her forehead. The two sons, Lakshmikanta and Purnachandra, hurled by the winds into a shallow pond nearby, floated numbly in shock. A day after last Tuesday, Bag kept a tearful vigil over Kaushalya's lifeless form. "It was all so sudden," sobbed Bag, "that I don't even know what happened."

 Some 2 km away from Bag's Sarta village in Midnapore, West Bengal's largest district, Amalendu Rout, a physical education teacher of a government-aided school in Gobarghata, a tiny village in Orissa's Balasore district, had sensed that nature was playing funny. Sitting in his school office, he spotted an "unusually large number of clouds"and the sky turning ominously dark. He decided to stop primary classes and send some 100 students home. When Rout heard the whistling wind 15 minutes later, he panicked and began running to the high school building nearby to stop classes and send some 110 students home from lessons. It was too late. "I felt a hot, hot wave of wind trying to lift me, and I saw children flying all around and the buildings crumbling," he says. A minute later, 13 children and the primary school headmaster, lay dead in the ruins, over 20 children smothered by debris struggled for life, and the three school buildings were rubble.

A minute later, the skies began weeping and spewing hail. But it was a cruel consolation: the minute-long tornado which had swept some 14 villages in West Bengal and Orissa had by then taken over a 70 lives, injured nearly 1,000 villagers, flattened some 2,000 mud-and-thatch huts leaving around 15,000 homeless, and destroyed 500 acres of lush paddy farms. Nature's most terrifying storm, born, in this case, of a cumulonimbus cloud—source of nor'westers as well as tornadoes—formed over the Bihar plateau earlier in the day had wreaked unimaginable havoc. A wispy tendril trailing from a cloud spawned a tunnel that spiralled around its parent—rotational wind speeds touching nearly 500 kmph—and progressed in a narrow path over some 50 sq km of land. "The whole world seemed to be spinning around me," remembers Tapan Jana, a Sarta grocer, with a shiver.

The twister spun everything out of control—and reduced villages to impressionistic landscapes of ruin. It uprooted trees and stripped them bare of their foliage, twisted electric poles and mangled power lines, sucked in mud homes, blew off a concrete roof of a school, and displaced fish from ponds. On the banks of the Subarnarekha river, the storm tore apart a sturdy truck loading sand and smashed the driver and his assistant to the river bed, killing them instantly. At Chak Ismailpur village, eight labourers were blown off and dashed on trees and farms, 300 yards away. None survived.

Those who lived to tell the tale were stunned by the suddenness of the calamity. Kamala Banik of Sarta was cooking at home when she heard "a strange sound, like an aeroplane flying low" and then saw the mud oven hurtling towards the thatch roof. The next moment, the roof had caved in and her home was on fire. Her neighbour, farm-owner Krishna Prasad Pal, who was enjoying a siesta, found himself unhurt in a rubble that seconds before had been a two-storey mud-and-concrete home. His two cycles, and a Rs 10,500-worth pumpset were blown off into nowhere. His two daughters-in-law were fighting for their lives in a hospital. "We've had our share of floods and storms which we manage to cope with," says Saikat Das Mahapatra, a school teacher of Aura. "But this was unpredictable."

What was not so unpredictable was the usual retinue of politicians descending on the affected villages with promises. In New Delhi, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was castigated by the Opposition for "playing politics with natural calamity" by stacking a three-member team of MPs to tour the affected areas with his party and coalition partners—BJD and Trinamul Congress—members. The Union government released Rs 20.8 crore for relief in West Bengal and Orissa, and in West Bengal, the state government released another Rs 3 crore.

BUT a day after the disaster, in West Bengal's affected villages, bodies lay strewn around in the fields—one farm-worker's body in a Sarta field had been partially chewed up by jackals—relief was scarce, and drinking water still not available. In Calcutta, ministers and bureaucrats brazenly bungled over the body count in West Bengal's villages—offi-cial figures varied from 47 and 83, both looking off-the-mark. In comparison, relief work in Orissa took off more smoothly, and drinking water trucks were rushed to Gobarghata within hours.

There were also rumblings about the lack of any meteorological warning of the storm. "It's virtually impossible to forecast a tornado," says R.N. Goldar, director of India Meteorological Department, Alipore. Instead, the met office had dished out regular reports of nor'wester squalls from Monday onwards—there are an average of 12 such storms in the eastern states during March and April. Apart from a slew of conventional radars, there are 10 cyclone determining radars on the east and west coasts. None of them is capable of detecting areas of strong rotation inside big tornado-producing storms. In a region where tropical thunderstorms are frequent—there have been three tornadoes in Bengal since 1983—meteorological surveillance is skimpy. The nearest meteorological observatory to the affected villages is 80 km away in Midnapore and takes only two readings every day.

Now, the Centre has placed orders for three state-of-the-art Doppler radars which can study the internal structure of a thunderstorm, detect wind shears and hint at a tornado. The radars, which cost up to Rs 2 crore each, will be installed in Calcutta, Machilipatnam (Andhra Pradesh) and Chennai, in a couple of years. But the hapless victims of this tropical storm will never forget the darkness at noon.