The fury unleashed was witnessed in Tamil Nadu on the anniversary of the last year’s floods that inundated the city and the suburbs. Never before in the independent India Tamil Nadu had faced such a whiplash of wind power.
The nation woke up to the effect of the gruesome hours, the state went through, only the next day as power supply was restored and clippings started to fill the social network sites and the TVs. It was ghastly to see buses loaded with passengers topple and turn turtle, unable to stand the strength of the power of winds lashing at 140 Kms/hour speed. The slippery and flooded streets made life more critical.
Lampposts in and trees in thousands lay snapped and uprooted. The streets resembled worse than war torn towns of Syria. Water supply was affected and so was milk supplies. Power was cut off for the safety of the citizens for more than 35 hours. Railways terminated their services faraway from the outermost ring of ‘Vardha,’ as the cyclone was named, and flights were cancelled in advance.
Loss of lives was in single figures, and that too due to electrocution in one or two places. The State was well prepared after the horrid experience of last year’s floods. Pood were fed from the government subsidized ‘Amma Canteens,’ and volunteers – students, para-military forces, police, civic police and NGOs, old and young thronged in the act of helping out the affected people, a few entrapped in their vehicles under the load of fallen trees.
The weather office’s forewarning on the intensity helped in realizing the intensity of the impending cyclone and the Tamil Nadu government worked with alacrity, moving the vulnerable communities to safe places, often schools. They had also declared the day a holiday and followed up with an extended 3 days holiday for all educational institutions, which have all become ‘rescue camps.’
My compliments to all the citizens of Tamil Nadu and the government including the opposition parties, who all acted responsibly and the state is yet again born out of the rubble to prove jointly we can. If not wars, such acts of challenges by nature often proves beyond doubt that humanity and kindness does exist on this planet after all!
Jai Hind!
