Severe cyclone approaches India’s financial capital Mumbai

This Tuesday, June 2, 2020, satellite image released by NASA shows Cyclone Nisarga roaring toward the western coast of India. The cyclone is forecast to make landfall Wednesday, June 3, 2020, afternoon on the country’s west coast near Mumbai, a coastal city home to 18.4 million people and known for the Bollywood film industry. Mumbai hasn’t been hit by a cyclone in more than a century, raising concern about its readiness. (NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) via AP)

MUMBAI, India — India’s western coast and financial capital of Mumbai braced for the first cyclone in a century on Wednesday as cases of the coronavirus continued to surge.

Police shooed people away from a beach as light rain fell. Homes in a nearby slum had been left and locked up, and municipal officials patrolled the streets, using bullhorns to order people to stay inside.

Nisarga was forecast to drop heavy rains and sustained winds of 100 to 110 kilometers (62 to 68 miles) per hour when it makes landfall Wednesday afternoon as a severe cyclone near the coastal city of Alibagh, about 98 kilometers (60 miles) south of Mumbai, India’s Meteorological Department said.

The state of Goa, south of Maharashtra, already received 127 millimeters (5 inches) of torrential rain — about a week’s average — as the cyclone moved along the coast, the meteorological agency said.

Some 100,000 people were evacuated from low-lying areas in Maharashtra and neighboring Gujarat, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. Both states, already among the hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic, activated disaster response teams, fearing extensive flooding could further impair overwhelmed health systems.

“If hospitals and clinics are damaged by the cyclone, the city won’t be able to cope with the large number of COVID-19 cases, and social distancing measures will become virtually impossible to follow,” Bidisha Pillai, chief executive of Save the Children in India, said in a statement.

“Let us fight this danger like we are standing up to the corona pandemic and are on our way to defeat it. Likewise, we will prevail over this situation too!” Maharashtra’s top official, Chief Minister Uddhav Balasheb Thackeray, tweeted.

Police officers patrol a deserted beach before Cyclone Nisarga makes landfall in Mumbai, India, Wednesday, June 3, 2020. A storm in the Arabian Sea off India’s west coast intensified into a severe cyclone on Wednesday, gathering speed as it barreled toward India’s financial capital of Mumbai. Nisarga was forecast to drop heavy rains and winds gusting up to 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour when it makes landfall Wednesday afternoon as a category 4 cyclone near the coastal city of Alibagh, about 98 kilometers (60 miles) south of Mumbai, India’s Meteorological Department said. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

The cyclone also threatened to worsen prospects for an economic turnaround as a 9-week-long government-imposed coronavirus lockdown began to ease this week. India has reported more than 200,000 cases and 5,800 deaths due to the virus.

Some special trains departing from Mumbai that for weeks have carried millions of economic migrants who lost their jobs in lockdown were rescheduled, and newly restored domestic airline travel postponed.

Nisarga comes just two weeks after Cyclone Amphan tore through the Bay of Bengal on India’s east coast and battered West Bengal state, killing more than 100 people in India and neighboring Bangladesh.