At the dead of night, Cyclone Remal, still circling around the Bay of Bengal at speeds of hundreds of kilometres per hour, will crash land off the coasts of West Bengal and Bangladesh. Days ago, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) issued the following alert: “Depression formed over central Bay of Bengal is very likely to intensify into a severe cyclonic storm (scs) by the night of 25 May. It is then likely to cross Bangladesh and adjoining West Bengal coasts between Sagar Island and Khepupara around 26 May midnight.”
The dread of cyclones still haunts Kolkata, which witnessed two devastating and back-to-back super cyclones in the middle of the pandemic. Cyclone Amphan stampeded through the city between 16 and 21 May 2020, destroying anything that came in its path, uprooting trees, taking down overhead electrical wiring and blowing away asbestos rooftops of shanties in slums. Cyclone Yaas ripped through the eastern coastline between 23 and 28 May 2021, causing similar and untold damage.
Indeed, May seems to be the preferred month for these superstorms. Who can forget the evil Aila, which arrived unannounced on 25 May 2009, ripping through the unsuspecting Sunderbans, wiping out entire villages, and killing an estimated 339 people?
“At that time, there was less dissemination of information than now, and the cyclone caught islanders in the Bay of Bengal off guard,” explains an environmental scientist. “Now the cyclone alerts are much more proactively issued, and it allows the administration to take precautionary safety measures and lets islanders in the vulnerable areas prepare beforehand.”
Indeed, summer is a time of intense worry for residents of the Sunderbans delta area. “The dread of another cyclone keeps us awake at night,” Gouranga Mete tells me. He is a resident of Ghoramara Island, which is disintegrating into the sea day by day anyway. Ghoramara, the closest island to Sagar Island, will be right in the middle of Cyclone Remal’s path.
Cyclones are more man-made than meets the eye. These twisters, though thought to be largely natural phenomena, are closely linked to climate change and global warming.
“When the surface of the sea or the ocean gets excessively heated, hot air rises, causing a depression to occur,” the environmental scientist explains. “This creates a hollow centre from the depth of the waters to the surface of the sea or ocean, and this vacuum pulls water into its centre as it twists and twirls around the sea or ocean, only stopping when it crashes into a coastline or land.”
This hollow is known as the “eye of the storm” and when it passes through a region, there is a stillness of sound, almost like a numbing silence, which is popularly called the “lull before the storm.”
I want to share a story from survivors who witnessed the eye of the storm during a cyclone. This account is from Ambarish Nag Biswas, president of the West Bengal Radio Club (Ham Radio), which was deployed as a disaster management team to coastal West Bengal for rescue work during Cyclone Foni in May 2019, quoting one of the boys present during the operation.
“We were cowering in our car at the side of the road, which had turned into a river that was swelling every second. It was too late for us to move to safety. The super cyclone had landed near Digha, where we had been deployed for rescue work. The sky had turned completely black, and visibility was zero. Rain pounded the ground, and winds, blowing at over 190 kilometres per hour, swished around us, sweeping everything into the vortex. We just had to anchor our vehicle, which became like a boat, bobbing up and down on the coastal street that had merged with the sea. It is a miracle that we lived through the ordeal to tell the story, narrating which still gives us goosebumps.”
They fell into the path of the “extremely severe cyclonic storm” as it was called, and they saw the “eye”, the hollow centre of the cyclone, with their own eyes. According to one of the men who had witnessed the twister as it passed them, it was like a giant with a massive, spherical body that stretched up to the sky. “We could not take our eyes off it,” he says, recalling the terrifying moment. “It is truly a miracle that we survived.”
It is ironic that the brunt of the adverse impact of cyclones is borne by those who least contribute to the production of greenhouse gases, which have caused the earth to heat up over the decades and punched holes into the ozone layer. Such as the poor people of the delta areas of the Bay of Bengal: they who do not even own refrigerators or air conditioners, which give off environmentally damaging heat; they who don’t travel in vehicles, which give off environmentally harmful fumes; that they whose lifestyles are closest to nature should bear the brunt of nature’s fury is something I cannot fathom. Says Joydeep Gupta, South Asia director of international environmental organisation The Third Pole, “Part of the damage to the Sunderbans post or during cyclones is a result of excessive deforestation.” He too points out the irony that the local population, which contributes almost nothing to the carbon footprint, bears the brunt of climate change-related superstorms. He explains that the indigenous mangrove forests of the Sunderbans have always served as a natural buffer for cyclones, blocking off high winds and water inundation.
Recently, the state administration has taken steps to plant mangrove trees in the coastal region to try and minimise the damage caused by cyclones. “The Mamata Banerjee government is committed to preventing damage to localities in the delta and has initiated a number of projects in the delta area,” says Dola Sen, a Rajya Sabha member of the Trinamul, the state’s ruling party.
In the meantime, in anticipation of Remal, the islanders have been evacuated to safe buildings and shelters.