india

Updated: May 04, 2019 00:23 IST

Four people died and six others were injured late on Thursday night as thunderstorms and heavy rain caused due to Cyclone Fani battered districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh, hours ahead of the storm making landfall in Odisha.

“Four people have died in Chandauli (in rain-related incidents) due to the impact of the cyclone,” the Uttar Pradesh chief minister’s office said in a tweet on Friday.

The deaths in Uttar Pradesh came as the cyclone affected weather as far as the Himalayan region in Nepal, forcing airport closures in places such as Kolkata in between. In Odisha’s Puri, where the cyclone made landfall, howling winds gusting up to 200 km/h whipsawed trees, uprooting scores, and destroying thatched houses. At least eight people died in Odisha, according to news agency PTI.

Uttar Pradesh meteorological department director JP Gupta confirmed that the rain and thunderstorm were triggered by Fani, an “extremely severe cyclonic storm”.

Three of the victims in UP were struck by lightning while six others were injured in Chandauli district. Another man was killed after a tree fell on him in Rammado village of the district.

Police said the injured people have been admitted to the hospital and their condition was stable.

Later on Friday, people in West Bengal, next on Fani’s trajectory, prepared for impact, as did Bangladesh where officials said a woman was killed by a tree and 14 villages were inundated as a tidal surge breached dams.

Some 400,000 people were taken to shelters in the neighbouring nation, officials told AFP, while hundreds of thousands more in West Bengal were also given orders to flee.