How Do You Save a Million People From a Cyclone? Ask a Poor State in India

BHUBANESWAR, India — Flights were cancelled.

Cyclone Fani made landfall in Puri, India, on Friday.
Officials said the gusts reached at least 100 m.p.h. (160kph)

Train service was out.

And one of the biggest storms in years was bearing down on Odisha, one of India’s poorest states, where millions of people live cheek by jowl in a low-lying coastal area in mud-and-stick shacks.

But government authorities in Odisha, along India’s eastern flank, hardly stood still. To warn people of what was coming, they deployed everything they had: 2.6 million text messages, 43,000 volunteers, nearly 1,000 emergency workers, television commercials, coastal sirens, buses, police officers, and public address systems blaring the same message on a loop, in local language, in very clear terms: “A cyclone is coming. Get to the shelters.”

It seems to have largely worked. Cyclone Fani slammed into Odisha on Friday morning with the force of a major hurricane, packing 120 mile per hour winds. Trees were ripped from the ground and many coastal shacks smashed. It could have been catastrophic.

But as of early Saturday, mass casualties seemed to have been averted. While the full extent of the destruction remained unclear, only a few deaths had been reported, in what appeared to be an early-warning success story.

Read the story from The New York Times by Hari Kumar, Jeffery Gettleman and Sameer Yasir  - “How Do You Save a Million People From a Cyclone? Ask a Poor State in India.”