Cyclone Dana: Three die of electrocution in Bengal, toll touches 4

Kolkata, Oct 26 : Three people died of electrocution on the waterlogged streets of West Bengal in three different parts of the state since Friday night.

This takes the total number of Cyclone Dana-related casualties in West Bengal to four since Friday, after the cyclone made its landfall in Odisha in the wee hours.

Sources from the state administration said that of the four deaths, three were caused by electrocution in the water-logged streets and one person died after getting tapped in a drain.

Two of the four deaths have been reported from South 24 Parganas district and one each from Kolkata and the city-adjacent Howrah district.

Meanwhile, the state administration has heaved a sigh of relief as the torrential rain that continued in several pockets in South Bengal almost the entire Friday started receding from midnight and has become minimum since Saturday morning.

As per officials from the Regional Meteorological Office in Kolkata, Cyclone Dana has now got converted into ordinary depression and is currently in Northern Odisha, because of which the intensity of the rain has declined substantially in West Bengal.

However, they added that pockets in West Bengal, especially the coastal belts might witness scattered rainfall even on Saturday.

At the same time, they predicted the weather condition would be totally normal from Saturday night.

However, the state administration is worried about the loss of crops on farmlands which are now inundated.

Sources from the state agriculture department said that post-landfall heavy showers have resulted in water-logging and flooding of farmland in several pockets in south Bengal during the harvesting season of the Kharif crop.

The negative impact is expected to be maximum in the two coastal districts of East Midnapore and South 24 Parganas, as well as in the West Midnapore and North 24 Parganas districts.

"The maximum impact will be on production of paddy as well as vegetables,” state agriculture department sources said.