Sudden Death on the Bay of Bengal

The drizzle gave way to heavy rains and eventually to squalls. In the tiny hamlet of Komali in Andhra state, on the Bay of Bengal, the parson of Christ Church flung open the church doors and called his flock from their thatched houses. "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden," he intoned in a deep bass, "and I will give you rest." About 125 villagers, most of them harijan (untouchable) converts, took shelter. When winds ranging up to 100 m.p.h. ripped off the roof, the walls crumbled and entombed the congregation; all were found dead the next day. Rosaiah, the village agnostic who lost his wife and two children, had not gone to the church. "It was God that failed," he moaned.

By the time the winds subsided last week at least 12,000 people had died in India's most devastating tropical storm since 1971. What had turned the storm into a killer were the 18-ft. tidal waves that swept as far as 15 miles inland across the low-lying rice land and coconut gardens of the Krishna River delta. About 150 sq. mi. of land became a solid sheet of water. Twenty-one villages, 13 of them in the delta, were inundated, leaving 2 million homeless. The port of Machilipatnam, 20 miles upriver, was destroyed. All told, about 2 million acres were affected, including 200,000 acres of rice ready for harvesting.

Rescue operations soon became entangled in politics. The state government is still controlled by the Congress Party, but Prime Minister Morarji Desai's Janata Party hopes to capture it in elections next February. Inevitably, there were charges from New Delhi that the state had been negligent in failing to warn villagers and careless in rescue efforts. In truth, emergency operations were reasonably effective. If anything hampered the relief effort, it was the seemingly endless helicopter inspections by officials seeking credit for coping with the disaster.