In Pics: How Cyclone Fani plunged 3.4 million homes into darkness

May 9, 2019, 17:48 IST

One of NASA's images capturing what Cuttack, a city in Odisha, looked like before Cyclone Fani hit the eastern Indian stateNASA

Cyclone Fani, one of the worst storms to hit India, has left the eastern state of Odisha without electricity.
Images from outer space show the severity of the cyclone’s impact where well-lit cities now look like purple shadows from NASA’s satellite.
The state’s neighbours and the central government are making efforts to restore electricity in the state as soon as possible.

Cyclone Fani — one of the worst storms to hit India — has not only taken 40 lives, but left Odisha in a state of darkness.

Images from the US space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Earth Observatory, show how millions of people are back to the Dark Ages, after Cyclone Fani knocked out most of the electricity in the state of Odisha.

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The storm hit the eastern coast of India during the last week of April. While the government was able to contain casualties with timely evacuation, they could not protect the city’s power infrastructure from being ravaged by the storm.

The cities of Puri, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Khurda saw the worst of it. As many as 3.5 million households continue to suffer without electricity, days after the storm came and left.

In fact, the only thing that’s working in the state right now are its traffic lights.

In Odisha’s largest city and the state capital, Bhubaneswar, insurance claims are expected to hit ₹35 billion. The damage is so intense that the Biju Patnaik International Airport will remain inoperational till Saturday.

The impact on Cuttack, Odisha’s second largest, looks even more severe with a drastic difference in the number of lights in the city. What was one a bright network of lights, is now a dull shadow.