Bulbul: Central team in Odisha to assess damage in cyclone-affected areas

Bhubaneswar, Nov 15: A seven-member Inter- Ministerial Central Team is in Odisha to assess the damage caused by cyclone Bulbul. The team will visit Bhadrak, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara and Balasore districts to evaluate the extent of damage and submit a report to the Centre, officials said.

Soon after arriving here on Thursday, the team led by Saheli Ghosh Roy, Joint Secretary (CIC), Ministry of Home Affairs, visited some of the affected areas at Chandbali in Bhadrak district.

The officials said that the team will split into two groups on Friday and make field visits to the affected blocks. Group A will conduct a field trip to Chandbali and Basudevpur blocks in Bhadrak district and Bhograi block in Balasore district. Group B will visit Rajnagar block in Kendrapara district and Kujang and Ersama blocks of Jagatsinghpur district. Both the groups will return to the state capital on Friday evening and attend a wrap-up meeting, to be chaired by Chief Secretary A K Tripathy.

Though the cyclone skipped Odisha and made landfall between West Bengal and Bangladesh coasts on Saturday, heavy downpour and gale-force winds left a trail of destruction, damaging hundreds of houses, uprooting trees, electric poles and affecting telecom towers in the state Preliminary report prepared by the state government said that the cyclone had caused damage to crops in three lakh hectares, which includes more than 33 per cent crop damage in over 2 lakh hectares land.

Around 5,500 houses were damaged, 16 lakh electric consumers affected and 653 piped water supply systems suffered break down due disruption in power supply.

The state government is likely to submit a preliminary damage assessment report to the team, the officials said. Besides Ghosh Roy, the other team members are Chief Engineer in Ministry of Power Vandana Singhal, consultant in Department of Expenditure Deena Nath, Deputy Secretary in Ministry of Rural Development SS Modi, Superintending Engineer of Central Warehousing Corporation, Odisha, Amarish Pal Singh. Director of DRD Agriculture in Patna Virendra Singh and senior official at the regional office of the Ministry of Road Transport in the state, Sunil Kumar are also in the team.