By: Shubham Ghosh
HEAVY rain on Monday (27) battered several parts of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh after cyclonic storm ‘Gulab’ made a landfall between the northern coastal parts of the state and southern Odisha around midnight on Sunday (26).
Several parts of Telangana, which lies to the west of Andhra, also experienced moderate to heavy rain as the storm, which weakened into a deep depression, moved towards northern Telangana and the adjoining state of Chhattisgarh in the last 12 hours.
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Dr K Nagaratna, the director of the meteorological department of Hyderabad, said a red alert had been raised in as many as 14 districts of Telangana that are expected to see heavy-to-heavy rainfall in the next 24 hours.\
The state government of Telangana asked the administration in those districts to prepare for any eventualities. State chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Monday announced that all government offices and educational institutions in the state would remain closed on Tuesday (28) because of the forecast of heavy rain over the next 48 hours.
In Srikakulam district of Andhra, district collector Shrikesh B Lathkar said there were reports of six fishermen, all belonging to Manchineelapeta village of the district’s Vazrapu Kothuru block, went missing in the sea at the time of the cyclonic storm making the landfall. He said while five of them managed to swim ashore, one was feared to have drowned.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy held a virtual meeting with the district collectors and other officials over Cyclone Gulab’s impact and asked them to quicken relief measures in the affected areas.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, who held a virtual meeting with district collectors and other officials over the impact of Cyclone Gulab, directed them to expedite relief measures in affected areas.
State chief secretary Adityanath Das, who had been monitoring the situation from the city of Visakhapatnam, told Reddy that heavy gales at a speed of 80-90 km per hour caused massive damage at several places in the north coastal parts of the state.