Tens of thousands flee vast cyclone bearing down on India

Sruthi Gottipati and Jatindra Dash in Reuters: Tens of thousands fled their homes in coastal areas of eastern India and moved to shelters on Friday, bracing for the fiercest cyclone to threaten the country since a devastating storm killed 10,000 people 14 years ago.

Large waves were already pounding beaches in the state of Andhra Pradesh over a day before Cyclone Phailin was due to hit. Villagers were evacuated to schools in the north of the state and in neighboring Odisha, while panic buying drove up food prices.

Satellite images showed Phailin some 500 km (310 miles) off the coast in the Bay of Bengal and likely to make landfall on Saturday evening, with widespread flooding expected from surges. The images showed the storm covering an area roughly half the size of India. Some forecasters likened its size and intensity to that of hurricane Katrina, which devastated the U.S. Gulf coast and New Orleans in 2005.

Some 260,000 people were moved to safer ground and more were expected to be evacuated by the end of the day, authorities in the two states said. Not everybody was willing to leave their homes and belongings, and some villagers on the palm-fringed Andhra Pradesh coast said they had not been told to evacuate....

Very Severe Cyclonic Storm Phailin on October 20, 2013. From NASA