The Bay of Bengal is a hotspot for storms, but the havoc that cyclone Amphan wrought in several districts of south Bengal is unmatched in many decades.

The cyclone struck close to the evening of May 20 and whistling winds kept pounding the southern districts for full three hours.

The districts that took the maximum blow include South 24 Parganas, North 24 Parganas, Kolkata and East Midnapore. A lot of destruction was also reported from the districts of Howrah, Nadia and Hooghly.

“We haven’t seen anything like this in decades. The impact was compounded since the cyclone struck when the state was going through the lockdown,” said West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who spent the night of May 20 at the state secretariat trying to coordinate relief work.

The cyclone made a landfall at 2.30 pm at a spot 20 km east of Sagar island (about 100 km to the south of Kolkata) at a speed varying between 155-165 km per hour with a maximum speed recorded at 185 km.

It swept through Kolkata with a maximum speed of 130 km per hour.

The chief minister estimated the damage at Rs 1 lakh crore. Prime Minister Narendra Modi who made a survey of the damage with Mamata Banerjee from a helicopter sanctioned Rs 1,000 crore and sent a central team to the state to make a detailed assessment of the damage.

The chief minister, too, announced a fund of Rs 1,000 crore for the relief work.

Disaster descended in a variety of ways from the sky and on land. Gale-force winds blew away roofs and brought down houses, toppled and twisted electric poles crippling the electricity distribution network, saline water surged from the seas washing away river embankments, flooding villages, filling up vast swathes of farmland and ponds, ruining crops and fish, killing at least nine lakh cattle heads and poultry and rendering millions without shelter, food and drinking water. Roads and bridges were washed away at many places.

Though the chief minister claimed that 8.5 lakh people were evacuated, 86 people lost their lives.

Leaders of Bharatiya Janata Party, Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Congress alleged that though the meteorological department issued alerts more than a week before the cyclone, the state was ill-prepared.

Banerjee and her lieutenants like urban development minister Firhad Hakim said that the administration was hamstrung by the lockdown and the fury of the cyclone was “unthinkable”.

“I have never seen such devastation in my life. Almost 99 percent of the South 24 Parganas district has been wiped out. The damage to Bengal is worse than what it suffered due to coronavirus,” Mamata said a day after the storm.

“It might take well over a month to make a proper estimate of the damage since the government has to visit every village affected and speak to a large number of people,” said a former additional chief secretary of the state who has handled a number of disasters from the widespread floods in 1978 to cyclone Aila in 2009.