The India Meteorological Department said on Saturday that Cyclonic Storm Biparjoy weakened into a Deep Depression at 11:30 PM on Friday over Southeast Pakistan adjoining Southwest Rajasthan and Kutch about 100 km northeast of Dholavira. The weather office also said that it will weaken further into a Depression during the next five hours. Udaipur witnessesed the impact of the Cyclone. Due to the impact of the cyclone, trees were uprooted in Gujarat' Bhuj, Kutch, as reported by the news agency ANI.
The NDRF team conducted the clearance work. As the cyclone weakened and moved towards south Rajasthan on Friday after ravaging the Kutch and Saurashtra regions, the Gujarat government faced the immediate challenge of restoring electricity in some 1,000 villages and clearing roads of fallen trees.
While the cyclone weakened after making landfall on the Kutch coast of Gujarat on Thursday evening, the IMD said that north Gujarat should brace for heavy rainfall. There was no loss of life on account of cyclone Biparjoy (which means calamity in Bengali) in Gujarat, the government said. Advance planning and mass evacuation of over one lakh persons helped the state achieve "zero casualty", Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel was quoted as saying in a press release.
To restore electricity, 1,127 teams are working in the districts of Kutch, Devbhumi Dwarka, Jamnagar, Morbi, Junagadh, Gir Somnath, Rajkot and Porbandar, said the release, adding that the forest department teams removed 581 fallen trees from the roads.
Commissioner of Relief Alok Kumar Pandey had said earlier that not a single person died due to any incident linked to the cyclone in the state, calling it the government's "biggest achievement." Among 1,09,000 persons shifted from coastal areas to temporary shelters there were 10,918 children, 5,070 senior citizens and 1,152 pregnant women, the government release said.
The cyclone made landfall along Saurashtra-Kutch coasts near Jakhau around 6:30 pm on Thursday, bringing incessant rains and wind speeds as high as 140 kmph.
The landfall was over by 2.30 am on Friday, and several parts of Kutch as well as Devbhumi Dwarka, Jamnagar, Rajkot and Morbi districts in Saurashtra regions were battered with very heavy rainfall of 100-185 mm on Friday accompanied by strong wind of up to 95 kmph, the State Emergency Operation Centre (SEOC) said.
In all, 175 talukas of the state received some amount of rainfall during the day, it said. The storm caused extensive financial loss to the state power utility Paschim Gujarat Vij Company Limited with 5,120 electricity poles getting damaged, relief commissioner Pandey said.
As many as 4,600 villages were left without power, but electricity supply was restored in 3,580 villages, he added. At least 23 people were injured due to cyclone-related incidents while many houses were also damaged, he said. Asked about a cattle-rearer duo of father and son dying on Thursday while trying to save their goats stuck in a flooded ravine in Bhavnagar district, Pandey said that since the district was not cyclone-affected, their deaths were not counted as cyclone-related.
"Three state highways were closed as they suffered damage.... A total of 581 trees were uprooted as per reports. Nine pucca and 20 kutcha houses collapsed, and two pucca and 474 kutcha houses suffered partial damage," he said. Sixty-five thatched houses were destroyed, and the government was preparing an order for immediate payment of compensation to those who have suffered losses, the official added. Several low-lying areas of the coastal districts were inundated because of a storm surge with tides going up to eight metres during the landfall.
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