The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said the landfall process of severe cyclonic storm 'Dana' began on the Odisha coast on Thursday night and was expected to continue until Friday morning.
The coastal districts of Bhadrak, Kendrapara, Balasore and nearby Jagatsinghpur district witnessed a sudden increase in wind speed from 100 kmph to 110 kmph and extremely heavy rain. A revenue department official said reports of trees getting uprooted were also received at the office of the Special Relief Commissioner.
However, the official said, there was no report of any major damage or casualties so far, even though the landfall process started more than an hour ago.
The storm moved north-northwest at a speed of 15 kmph over the past six hours before making landfall between Bhitarkanika in the Kendrapara district and Dhamra in Bhadrak, with wind speeds of around 110 kmph, a senior IMD official said.
“The landfall process has commenced and the forward sector of the wall cloud region is entering into the land. The process will continue till Friday morning," Umashankar Das, a senior scientist at the Regional Meteorological Centre in Bhubaneswar, told PTI.
When the centre of the system reaches land, wind speeds are expected to reach 120 kmph, he said, adding that the landfall process will last for about four to five hours. "The system is under continuous surveillance of the Doppler weather radar at Paradip," he said.
Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi said that both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah had enquired about the Odisha government’s preparedness to tackle the situation arising out of the cyclone.
The chief minister said that the state has already evacuated around 5.84 lakh people from the high-risk zones located in the low-lying areas of coastal districts.
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