A Big Natural Disaster

This matter is from 15 December 1964 . When India identified the low pressure India being built in South Andaman. Which means the rain and storm were about to knock. Everything seems fine, nobody thought that the medium wind of 45 kilometre/ hour was going to take the shape of hurricane (storm) soon.

On December 21, the storm started moving towards the west. And this is the satellite imagery of the time,

which is showing a clear cloud forming in a radius of about 965 kilometre.

On 22nd December, a storm knocked over the northern tip in Ceylon( Sri Lanka), which had a speed of about 110 kilometre/hour. After hitting, the storm started moving towards north west and after that its speed was over 280 kilometre/ hour. In the evening of December 22nd Mr Sundar, who was the station master of dhanushkodi, reached home after finishing his duty.

Around 9:00 in the night, the weather became very bad due to the strong wind and water started entering people's houses. Nobody knew what was happening. Just a short distance from dhanushkodi railway station, train number 653 pamban dhanushkodi passenger train, was a daily train, used to take passengers from pamban to dhanushkodi. At 11:55 p.m. that night, this train had gone for ahead of pamban and was about to reach dhanushkodi when the speed of the storm suddenly increased.

Due to darkness and shutdown of signal system, the loco pilot had to stop the train far behind from dhanushkodi station. After waiting for a long time, the loco pilot drove the train forward without signal. The Waves were very high and the Waves swallowed the whole train in one go. Around 110 -200 people were swept away with waves.

The storm continued for hours and during that time more than thousand people lost their lives in dhanushkodi alone. It is said that it was a huge storm on the coast of India, whose sign is still seen in dhanushkodi, uprooted rail tracks, stations, houses.This all remind us the same story, that it was really a big natural disaster.