KARACHI –
Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) on Thursday said that Cyclone Nilofar has started weakening and is unlikely to make a landfall in coastal areas of Pakistan, a private news channel reported.
The cyclone’s eye will pass around 250 kilometres from Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city with over 18 million people, chief meteorologist Touseef Alam said.
But the storm’s “outer waves would hit Pakistani coasts”, Alam said, bringing strong winds, high tides and rains to southern Pakistan, especially drought-hit districts of southern Sindh province. Nilofar – listed as a “very severe cyclonic storm” by Indian weather officials – is barrelling across the Arabian Sea packing winds of up to 220 kilometres (132 miles) an hour.
The cyclonic storm in the Arabian Sea is expected to move towards Indian coastal belt after reaching at a distance of 250 kilometers from Karachi this evening. It will further die down afterwards, the PMD said.
According to PMD, the cyclone is presently located about 600 kilometer south-west of Karachi and likely to hit Indian Gujarat state.
Earlier, the PMD had forecasted that the cyclone may hit Pakistan’s coastal belt, prompting authorities to put relevant departments on ‘high alert’, banning deep sea fishing and beach picnics, imposed a state of emergency in hospitals and directed evacuation of villages along the coast.
The cyclone will weaken substantially as it reaches the coast of the western Indian state of Gujarat on Saturday, according to the Indian Meteorological Department forecast. Nilofar will “cross the coast as a marginal cyclonic storm with a wind speed of 60-70 kilometers per hour, gusting to 80 kilometers per hour,” the department said on its website.
Indian authorities said they were taking no chances with the storm – which is expected to make landfall in Gujarat’s Kutch district. “We have identified around 30,400 people who will be shifted from coastal areas to safer places by this evening,” Kutch official M.S. Patel told a foreign news agency.
“We have estimated some 50,000 people might be evacuated if the need arises,” Ikhlaque Qureshi, a senior National Disaster Management Authority official said.
. The storm comes after Cyclone Hudhud slammed into India’s east coast earlier this month, leaving some 20 people dead.
The tail end of that cyclone swept into neighbouring Nepal causing snowstorms that claimed more than 40 lives in one of the country’s worst Himalayan trekking disasters.
Cyclone Phailin, which struck India last October, had winds of up to 220 kilometres per hour and caused extensive damage. The South Asian region is routinely hit by bad storms between April and November that cause deaths and widespread damage to property.
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