Misery's Spawning Ground

The most devastating cyclones in history have boiled up out of the Bay of Bengal. In 1876, one of them took 100,000 lives in half an hour. In 1942, a wall of sea water 30 ft. high, advancing in front of 120-m.p.h. winds, washed over 5,000 sq. mi. of Bengal. In this century's worst natural disaster, a cyclone-rose up from the bay last year and swept across the coastal area of East Pakistan, killing as many as 500,000. Last week the ghastly business of counting bodies along the bay's palm-fringed coastline was under way again. A storm with shrieking 120-m.p.h. winds, torrential rains and a 15-ft. tidal wave struck India's Orissa State, southwest of Calcutta. The death toll was set officially at 12,000, though unofficial estimates indicated that it could be closer to 25,000. Fully 1,000,000 were left homeless. Many of the victims were refugees who had poured out of East Pakistan to escape the man-made violence there.

The killer storm left nearly 10,000 sq. mi. of fertile farm land inundated, in some places by water 18 ft. deep. The area of greatest suffering was a heavily populated 15-mile stretch of coastline between the Mahanadi and Baitarani rivers.

A Man Alone. Entire villages were wiped out, and the sodden ground was spotted with bloated corpses and the debris of houses, offices and shops. The port of Paradeep, India's eighth largest, was heavily damaged. Rivers overflowed their banks. Trees were uprooted and countless people were swept away in the tidal surge.

One man, with his wife and four sons, rode the tide atop a patch of straw that had been the roof of their house. In the end, the man was alone. "They all lost their grip and floated away," he said, "my wife and sons, the big and the small ones." Said another victim: "That night it seemed as though the whole town was crying."

After one night of terror, the storm's fury abated. Indian federal and state governments moved quickly to provide aid to the victims of Orissa. Soldiers helped in the digging-out process while military planes dropped supplies to the survivors. Menial laborers, most of them belonging to India's "untouchable" caste, were brought in to help dispose of the bodies.

Many in India wondered aloud why the government had not taken steps to prepare Orissa for the cyclone. When it was first spotted and reported by a U.S. weather satellite a full day before it hit land, the storm seemed to be headed for the very area of East Pakistan that was devastated last year. Then it changed direction, but the satellite forecast well in advance that it was headed for Orissa. "The authorities seem always caught unawares by calamities, even when they are at least partially foreseeable," said the Statesman, one of India's leading dailies. "The traditional attitude of resignation to the caprices of nature seems totally out of tune with modern times." At week's end a new cyclone was ominously brewing in the bay, which seems to be an inexhaustible spawning ground of misery; it was heading toward India's east coast.

* Hurricanes, as they are known in the Atlantic and Caribbean, are called cyclones in Southern Asia and typhoons in the Pacific.

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