Andhra Pradesh heaved a sigh of relief as ‘Lehar’, which was initially categorised as a severe cyclonic storm, petered out into a deep depression today and made landfall near Machilipatnam in the e

The Severe Cyclonic Storm Lehar turned into a ‘Deep depression’ and crossed coast near Machilipatnam at around 2 p.m. on Thursday.

Trees were uprooted disrupting traffic, communication and electricity towers were damaged as strong gales with speed reaching 100-110 kmph caused havoc in the coastal districts

Yesterday’s cyclonic storm ‘HELEN’ over west central Bay of Bengal intensified into a severe cyclonic storm in the early morning of today, the 21st November 2013 and lay centred at 0830 hrs IST of today near latitude 15.80N and longitude 83.40E about 240 km east-southeast of Machillipatnam, 350 km east-northeast of Ongole and 210 km south-southeast of Vishakhapatnam. It would move northwestwards slowly for some time, then westward and cross Andhra Pradesh coast near Machillipatnam around afternoon/evening of 22nd November 2013.

Coastal towns of Machilipatnam, Surya Lanka, Kavali and Gudur in Andhra Pradesh are sensitive regions with high return levels of sea surge in case of cyclones or tidal waves in the Bay of Bengal.

The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure has approved the project of four laning of Vijayawada-Machilipatnam section of National Highway (NH)-9 in Andhra Pradesh under the National Highway Developme

In a bid to introduce greater transparency in the road sector, the transport ministry on Tuesday said it has fixed the monthly monitorable targets for road building and will bid out all projects beginning August through the e-tendering process.

A study has been carried out by comparing the extreme wind speeds estimated based on NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data for 100 years return period using Fischer Tippet-1 (commonly known as Gumbel) and Weibull distributions for three locations (off Goa, Visakhapatnam and Machilipatnam) in the north Indian Ocean. The wind dataset for Goa is compared with that from ERA-40 data. For higher wind speeds (12–20 m s−1), NCEP wind speed has higher percentage of occurrence than that of ERA-40.

The country