Biparjoy Weakens to Tropical Storm Status after Making Landfall in India

· Mundhra and Kandla ports shut down after Biparjoy storm...jetty at Okha swept away

The storm weakened to the equivalent of a tropical storm after making landfall as a cyclone. Tens of thousands of residents were evacuated

Biparjoy, a powerful storm that lingered for days over the Arabian Sea, was moving across India on Friday with wind speeds equivalent to those of a tropical storm in the Atlantic Ocean.

The storm made landfall as a cyclone in India on Thursday night, bringing strong winds, rain and high tides. But it weakened on Friday as it moved northeast over land close to the Pakistan border. By Friday night it was forecast to become the equivalent of a tropical depression, the India Meteorological Department said in a bulletin.

Biparjoy made landfall in the western Indian state of Gujarat, uprooting trees and sending billboards crashing to the ground. Train services were suspended in many parts of Gujarat, and the Kandla and Mundra ports, among the country’s largest, halted operations.

Officials said that Biparjoy, which means “disaster” in Bengali, claimed at least three lives before the storm made landfall: three boys who drowned off the coast of Mumbai this week. Another was still missing, they said.

More than 100,000 people were evacuated in India before the storm arrived, as were about 73,000 others in Pakistan, officials in both countries told The Associated Press.

“This is nature’s force, and you can’t predict 100 percent,” Atul Karwal, the chief of India’s National Disaster Response Force, said on Thursday. “We want to be prepared for the worst.”

Television footage earlier this week from Maharashtra, the western coastal state that includes Mumbai, India’s financial epicenter, showed high waves flooding roads along the coast.

Some of India’s coastal areas were deserted on Thursday, and some residents at shelters feared that their crops and livestock might not survive.

At one shelter in Gujarat, a school in the town of Naliya, more than 800 people were waiting for the storm to pass on Thursday. Sunil Karwa, a fisherman, said he had spent the night at the shelter with his wife and two children, thinking about the livestock he left behind in the Kutch District, a hard-hit area.

“We are all praying that there is no destruction this time, but one thing is for sure, government has done whatever it could to save people,” Mr. Karwa said.

Pakistan is still reeling from devastating floods last year that submerged large parts of the country, killed almost 1,700 people and displaced a large population.

Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s climate change minister, said that Karachi, a city of 22 million, would probably face flooding because of the scale and intensity of the winds. Last year, torrential rains caused widespread urban flooding and damage in the port city, bringing it to a standstill for days. At least 31 people died, many of whom were electrocuted or drowned after roofs and walls collapsed on them, the provincial disaster agency said.

Tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea have become more frequent in recent decades because of warming sea-surface temperatures in the region that are enhanced by a warming climate, according to researchers.