In brief
Cyclone Murasu made landfall near Ongole in Prakasam district on Tuesday night, uprooting trees, toppling electricity poles and flooding low‑lying areas. Authorities evacuated around 30,000 people and are providing disaster relief, while no deaths or injuries have been reported yet. The storm follows Cyclone Arnab and may bring further damage across the region as the national and state response teams work to assess the situation.
Cyclone Murasu made landfall on India’s eastern coast near Ongole in Prakasam district on Tuesday night (19:30 GMT Monday), uprooting trees, toppling electricity poles and flooding low‑lying areas of Andhra Pradesh.
The India Meteorological Department warned of heavy to very heavy rain across several districts, and forecast that Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu would be the hardest hit areas. Heavy rain has also been expected in neighboring Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and Odisha.
In Prakasam and Bapatla districts, thousands of trees were felled, hundreds of power poles damaged, fishing boats wrecked, and standing crops hit hard, with many areas underwater. No deaths or injuries have been reported so far, according to Prakhar Jain, managing director of the Andhra Pradesh State Disaster Management Authority, who told Reuters.
Authorities began evacuating people on Monday, with plans to move about 30,000 residents to safety in Andhra Pradesh. A fisherman from Kothapatnam called Krishnamma, who spoke to the Press Trust of India, said some 400 families from his village had been moved out before the storm hit.
"This is the most dangerous cyclone we have witnessed in the last 14 years," Krishnamma said to PTI.
Indian Home Minister Amit Shah tweeted on X that he had spoken to Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu about the cyclone’s impact, assuring the central government would provide all kinds of assistance and that national and state disaster response teams were already on the ground.
Murasu formed over the Bay of Bengal, a region that regularly spawns deadly storms on India’s east coast. It is the second cyclone to strike the area in a week, the first being Cyclone Arnab, which caused heavy damage in Andhra Pradesh and neighboring Odisha.
While no casualties have been reported, the full extent of the damage and the long‑term impacts remain uncertain. Authorities are still assessing flooded areas, damaged infrastructure, and the effectiveness of ongoing evacuation and relief efforts.
