UPDATED ON:
SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2007
10:55 MECCA TIME, 7:55 GMT
 
NEWS CENTRAL/S. ASIA
Scores killed in Indian floods
Bad weather is expected to
last for another 24 hours [AP]
 

At least 45 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced as a tropical storm hit India's south, sparking a major relief operation.

 

Preeti Sudan, a disaster management chief, said: "We have opened up 95 relief camps ... for 56,000 displaced people and also brought in 200 medical teams to contain the spread of water-related diseases."

On Saturday, Musari Venkateswarlu, a school teacher in Guntur's Macherla town, said: "I spent the night on my rooftop along with my family after flood water gushed into my house."

More heavy rains were forecast for at least the next 24 hours, the director of a local cyclone warning centre said.

Hundreds of trees were uprooted, electric poles felled and highways flooded as low-lying villages and small towns in the Kurnool and Guntur districts of the Andhra Pradesh state took the full force of the storm.

 

The dead included 15 people swept away by a flash flood near a bridge construction site in Kurnool, 225km southwest of the state capital, Hyderabad.


About a dozen others were killed by lightning strikes.

 

Storms and monsoon rains kill hundreds of people and force hundreds of thousands from their homes every year across India.

Source: Agencies
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