The cyclone barrelled into eastern India on Friday (May 3), damaging houses in the tourist town of Puri and wounding 160 people after a million people were moved into storm shelters.
Trees were uprooted, power and telecom lines snapped as Tropical Cyclone Fani, the strongest storm to hit India in five years, swept ashore the eastern state of Odisha.
A shopkeeper, Himalaya Batra, looking hopelessly at his destroyed shop, his only source of income, said that irrespective of all the preparations the authorities made, the cyclone destroyed everything.
Teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and state police were seen clearing the roads and trying to bring back normalcy.
Fani spent days building up power in the northern reaches of the Bay of Bengal before it struck the coast of Odisha at around 8 a.m., the state-run India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
Howling winds gusting up to 200 kph (124 mph) whipsawed trees, uprooting scores, and driving rain impacted visibility, while streets were deserted in the state capital Bhubaneswar and Puri.
(Production: Sophia Soo)