Attachments
Authors: Jack O’Connor, Caitlyn Eberle, Amy Newsom and Zita Sebesvari
1. Event
On May 13th, 2020, an area of low atmospheric pressure encountered exceptionally warm sea surface temperatures in the North Indian Ocean and started forming a cyclonic storm. It was classified as a tropical depression three days later, on May 16 (Kumar and others, 2021a), before undergoing rapid intensification from a cyclonic storm (Category 1) to a super cyclonic storm (Category 5) in less than 36 hours (Balasubramanian & Chalamalla, 2020). Reaching maximum wind speeds of up to 260 kmh-1 on May 18, this super cyclonic storm, given the name ‘Amphan’ (pronounced as Um-Pun), became the strongest cyclonic storm in the Bay of Bengal since 1999 (Khan and others, 2020). On the afternoon of May 20, Cyclone Amphan made landfall in a low-lying deltaic region straddling the border between India and Bangladesh (see Figure 1). The storm brought torrential rain and a storm surge of five metres above the average tidal height, with wind speeds reaching up to 155 kmh-1 as it hit the coast, causing devastation in the coastal regions of both countries (Basheer Ahammed & Pandey, 2021). This low-lying region has long struggled with high exposure to extreme weather events combined with high vulnerability driven by a number of factors, including unemployment, a high dependency ratio, unavailability of electricity, inadequate sanitation facilities, vector and waterborne diseases, and unavailability of paved roads (Sahana and others, 2019). Since Cyclone Amphan co-occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic, people were uniquely vulnerable due to the direct and indirect impacts of a novel biological hazard. As such, the response and management of the pandemic were often entirely at odds with preparing and responding to a cyclone and vice versa; the response to the cyclone was constrained by the pandemic and the respective containment measures (Pramanik and others, 2021).