A coastline that had spent days watching the sky darken finally felt the storm arrive on Wednesday, because Cyclone Arnab made landfall in India’s Andhra Pradesh as a very severe cyclonic storm, the third-highest category on the national scale, forcing the evacuation of at least one hundred and eighty thousand people, cancelling flights and trains, closing schools in two countries, and sending a warning all the way to the Himalayas, where trekkers were told to stay away from high mountain passes.
Cyclone Arnab arrived with winds of one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and thirty-five kilometres per hour and gusts reaching one hundred and fifty, strong enough to uproot power poles, tear thatched roofs apart and push a storm surge of up to one point five metres above tide level into low-lying coastal districts, and although officials reported no casualties in the first hours after landfall, the scale of the evacuation, covering more than twelve million people living in the storm’s expected path, showed how seriously authorities were taking a system that weakened only gradually as it moved inland.
Table of Contents
Cyclone Arnab: landfall in Andhra Pradesh and a coast braced for flooding
The India Meteorological Department had warned of total destruction of thatched houses, localised flooding, widespread damage to standing crops and the uprooting of power and communications poles, and the early pictures from Visakhapatnam and Kakinada bore that warning out in smaller, human details, with motorcyclists picking their way through floodwater, a vehicle crushed by a fallen tree, and residents describing a night in which nobody knew whose house the water would rush into next or whose home would be submerged.
Flights to Andhra Pradesh and Odisha were among the most affected, according to the civil aviation ministry, while train services were cancelled and schools closed across the coastal belt, a shutdown that reflected not only the wind but the rain that follows a cyclone inland, since a storm that is downgraded from very severe to severe after landfall can still drown fields, cut roads and isolate villages long after its winds have eased.
Cyclone Arnab also arrived in a season already charged by the El Nino phenomenon, which scientists link to unprecedented ocean warming, a background factor that does not explain any single storm on its own but helps explain why forecasters, governments and coastal communities across the Bay of Bengal now treat each landfall as a test of preparation rather than a stroke of luck.
Cyclone Arnab: Nepal, Sri Lanka and a region on alert
Beyond India’s coast, Cyclone Arnab cast its shadow in two very different directions, because in Nepal, authorities warned tourists on Tuesday not to enter high-altitude areas, suspended the issuing of trekking permits for three days, and warned of torrential downpours, snowstorms and avalanches from Thursday through to Saturday, a serious disruption in peak hiking season, when about seven hundred and fifty hikers receive permits every single day.
That warning landed with particular force in a country still recovering from a catastrophic glacial mountain collapse in August, which killed more than fourteen hundred people and left at least five thousand missing, and which has left both officials and mountain communities acutely aware of how quickly a weather system over the Bay of Bengal can turn into a Himalayan emergency hundreds of kilometres away.
Sri Lanka, meanwhile, closed schools as its Department of Meteorology warned that the storm could trigger flash floods and landslides, a precaution that, like Nepal’s trekking suspension, showed how a cyclone’s influence is measured not only by where its eye crosses the coast but by the rain, wind and sea it drags across an entire region, touching lives that never see the storm itself.
What Cyclone Arnab reveals about living with stronger storms
Looked at as a whole, Cyclone Arnab is a reminder that modern storm preparation is now a chain with many links, because the evacuation of one hundred and eighty thousand people, the early closure of schools, the suspension of trekking permits and the pre-positioning of rescue teams all had to work together, and the absence of early casualties, if it holds as the full damage is assessed, will owe as much to those unglamorous decisions as to any good fortune in the storm’s track.
The harder test comes next, in the days when floodwater lingers, crops are counted, power lines are repaired and families who left their homes return to see what remains, and it is there, in the recovery rather than the landfall, that the true cost of Cyclone Arnab will be measured, not only in rupees and ruined harvests but in the resilience of coastal and mountain communities that are learning, storm by storm, to live with a climate that no longer offers them a quiet season.
For further coverage of this story, see the Reuters report: Three killed, thousands evacuated as Cyclone Arnab hits eastern India.
