Cyclone Murasu landfall near Ongole: 110 km/h winds, boats and crops hit
Cyclone Murasu hit Andhra Pradesh near Ongole at 1 AM on Tuesday with winds up to 110 km/h. No deaths confirmed so far. Damage, flights and Odisha.
Cyclone Murasu came ashore on the south Andhra Pradesh coast near Ongole in Prakasam district around 1 AM on Tuesday, 3 November, with winds of up to 110 km/h and gusts of 120 km/h, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said. It is the second cyclone to hit the state in under a week, after Cyclone Arnab.
Our earlier story covered the red alert before the storm; this is what happened when it arrived.
How bad is the damage?
Prakasam and neighbouring Bapatla district took the worst of it. Thousands of trees came down, hundreds of electricity poles were damaged, fishing boats were wrecked and standing crops were flattened, with many low-lying areas under water. The IMD had warned of a storm surge of 1 to 1.5 metres above the normal tide along the south coast until Tuesday morning.
“It is the most dangerous cyclone we have witnessed in the last 14 years,” Krishnamma, a fisherman from Kothapatnam village in Prakasam, said. About 400 families from his village were moved out before landfall.
Were there deaths?
Prakhar Jain, head of the Andhra Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority, said on Tuesday that no deaths or injuries had been reported so far. Some later live updates in Indian media mentioned two deaths in cyclone-related incidents, but this has not been confirmed by state officials, so treat that figure as unconfirmed until the authority updates its count.
Authorities planned to move about 30,000 people to safety in Andhra Pradesh, and India’s Home Minister Amit Shah wrote on X that he had spoken to Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu and that “the Central Government will provide all kinds of assistance and support.”
Flights, Tamil Nadu and Odisha
- Flights: at least 19 domestic flights were cancelled on Monday at Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam and Tirupati airports, 10 of them IndiGo services.
- Tamil Nadu: heavy rain has hit Chennai, Chengalpattu and Tiruvallur since Sunday night, and Chennai airport cancelled several flights.
- Odisha: more than 160,000 people were moved to safety and disaster response teams went to five southern districts. The state is still recovering from Cyclone Arnab, which killed at least six people in floods and landslides last week.
Why it matters here
Murasu is a Bay of Bengal storm and does not affect Pakistan, which sits on the Arabian Sea side. But two cyclones in a week on India’s east coast show how active this post-monsoon season has been, and Pakistan’s own cyclone season on the Arabian Sea runs through the same months.
What to watch next: the IMD expects heavy to very heavy rain to continue across coastal Andhra Pradesh as the storm weakens inland, and the disaster authority’s next update on casualties and crop losses.
