Cyclone Murasu Weakens to a Low Over Telangana After Ongole Landfall Leaves Two Dead and ₹344 Crore Damage in Andhra

When a severe cyclonic storm crosses a crowded coastline, the landfall itself is only the middle of the story. What follows — the slow weakening inland, the rain that keeps falling long after the wind eases, and the first, still provisional count of what was lost — is often what people in the affected districts remember longest. That is the shape of Cyclone Murasu’s second act. After days of warnings over the Bay of Bengal, the storm came ashore on India’s south-eastern coast, then lost strength step by step as it moved inland, leaving flooded fields, swollen drains and a damage bill that officials were still adding up. This post follows that journey from severe storm to fading low, and explains what is confirmed, what is still an early estimate, and what forecasters were still watching as the system dissolved. Cyclone Murasu landfall aftermath November 2026.

1. From a severe storm to a fading low

1.1 A step-by-step weakening

The India Meteorological Department tracked Murasu’s decline in a series of timed bulletins, and the sequence matters because it shows how quickly a coastal threat can change character once it leaves the sea. According to the department’s press release timed at 2 p.m. India time on November 4, the severe cyclonic storm first weakened into a cyclonic storm during the afternoon of November 3, then into a deep depression that same evening, and then into a depression in the early hours of November 4. Each step down meant weaker winds, but it did not mean the danger had passed, because a slow-moving depression can still drop very heavy rain over a wide area. Forecasters therefore kept issuing rain and wind warnings even as the system’s name began to disappear from the top of their bulletins.

1.2 Where the remnant was last tracked

By the morning of November 4, the depression — the remnant of the former severe cyclonic storm — was centred over east Telangana and the adjoining coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh. The department placed it near Khammam in Telangana, roughly ten kilometres to the south-west of that town, and gave a string of reference points stretching across both states, from Nandigama and Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh to Nalgonda and Bhadrachalam in Telangana. It was moving only slowly, at about six kilometres an hour, almost due north. That slow pace is itself part of the story: a system that crawls rather than races can sit over the same river basins for hours, and that is when waterlogging, overflowing drains and localised flooding become most likely, even when the wind itself is no longer destructive.

2. Landfall near Ongole

2.1 The crossing window

Murasu crossed the south Andhra Pradesh coast in the early hours of November 3, close to Ongole in Prakasam district, between the Nellore and Narsapur stretches of coastline. Published accounts differ slightly on the precise window, with some putting the crossing between about 3:30 and 5:30 in the morning and others describing a longer process running from around 1 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., and that difference is worth noting rather than smoothing over. What the accounts agree on is the place and the character of the event: a severe cyclonic storm coming ashore on a low-lying, densely settled coast, at an hour when most people were asleep and when official warnings, evacuation decisions and shelter arrangements had already been made the day before.

2.2 Winds, surge and the sea coming inland

At landfall the storm was reported with sustained winds of about 100 to 110 kilometres an hour, gusting to around 120 kilometres an hour. That is strong enough to tear roofing sheets, snap branches and bring down power lines, and in coastal villages it was accompanied by a storm surge reported at roughly one to one and a half metres above the normal tide. One account reported seawater pushing about 330 metres inland around Ongole. A surge of that kind does not need hurricane-force wind to do damage: it floods ground-floor homes, contaminates wells, damages stored grain and fishing gear, and leaves salt water on fields that farmers had hoped to harvest. The wind figure and the surge figure should both be read as reported values from the landfall morning, subject to the department’s later verification, but together they explain why the coastal damage was concentrated in a relatively narrow belt even as the rain spread much wider inland.

3. Rain that kept falling inland

3.1 Telangana’s heaviest totals

As Murasu moved inland and weakened, its rain footprint shifted north and west into Telangana. In the 24 hours to 8:30 a.m. India time on November 4, Mulakalapalle in Bhadradri Kothagudem district recorded about 23.82 centimetres of rain — close to 238 millimetres in a single day, which counts as extremely heavy by the department’s scale. Totals of that order overwhelm urban drains and rural tanks alike. They also explain why forecasters kept warning about waterlogging and localised flooding in Telangana even after the system had been downgraded to a depression: the storm’s centre may have been weakening, but the moisture it carried was still being wrung out over the same districts hour after hour.

3.2 Andhra Pradesh and the neighbouring states

Coastal Andhra Pradesh recorded similarly extreme rain in the same 24-hour period, with West Godavari district reporting about 21.04 centimetres. The warnings for November 4 still covered heavy to very heavy rain at isolated places in north coastal Andhra Pradesh and east Telangana, and heavy rain at isolated places in south Odisha, south Chhattisgarh and north Tamil Nadu. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed Bay of Bengal storms: the wind damage is worst at the coast, but the rain damage travels with the remnant for a day or two afterwards, reaching districts that never felt the strongest gusts. For farmers, that distinction matters, because a crop flattened by wind and a crop drowned by standing water are damaged in different ways and need different kinds of relief assessment.

4. What the damage estimate covers — and does not

4.1 The first Andhra estimate

Andhra Pradesh’s first damage estimate for Murasu was reported at about 343.95 crore rupees, roughly 344 crore in rounded terms. A first estimate of this kind is best understood as an opening tally, not a final audit. It typically gathers early reports from district administrations on roads, power infrastructure, housing, agriculture and public buildings, and it is revised as survey teams reach villages that were cut off during the storm and as crop-loss assessments are completed. Readers should therefore treat the figure as the state’s early, reported estimate on November 4, and expect it to move — in either direction — as fuller surveys come in. What it already establishes, even at this early stage, is that Murasu was not a storm that passed without a bill: the coastal districts bore real, counted costs.

4.2 Two deaths reported

Two confirmed fatalities were reported in connection with the storm’s passage. That number, like the damage figure, comes from early reporting and should be read with care: casualty counts in the first days after a storm can change as missing-person reports are resolved and as district authorities confirm causes. The reported figure nevertheless anchors the human cost of the event in a way that a damage total in rupees cannot. It is also a reminder of why the timing of landfall matters — a storm arriving in the early hours, when warnings must compete with sleep and darkness, tests every part of the preparedness chain, from the accuracy of the forecast track to the decision to move people to shelters before the wind arrives.

5. Warnings as the system faded

5.1 The department’s last bulletin

By the afternoon of November 4, the department issued what was described as its last bulletin on Murasu. The remnant had weakened into a well-marked low pressure area over east Telangana and the adjoining Andhra coast by late morning, and forecasters expected it to weaken further into an ordinary low within about twelve hours. Ending the special bulletins did not mean ending all warnings: regular national and state forecasts took over, and rain warnings for the affected regions continued under those forecasts. The handover is routine — special cyclone bulletins are for a named, organised system — but it can confuse residents who hear that the cyclone is over and assume the rain is over too. In this case it was not, quite yet.

5.2 Rain and wind warnings that remained

Even as the low faded, the department still warned of heavy to very heavy rain at isolated places in north coastal Andhra Pradesh and east Telangana, and of strong winds of about 25 to 35 kilometres an hour, gusting to around 45, for a further twelve hours over east Telangana and north coastal Andhra Pradesh. Squalls that had earlier been put at 40 to 50 kilometres an hour were thus downgraded, but not removed. A separate flash-flood risk assessment, rated low to moderate, was narrowed to four districts — East Godavari, West Godavari, Konaseema and Eluru — after several other districts were taken off the list. For the following day, November 5, a yellow warning for thunderstorms with lightning and gusty winds of 30 to 40 kilometres an hour covered isolated places across a long list of Telangana districts, from Karimnagar and Peddapalli to Khammam, Warangal and Rangareddy. The message, in short, was that the cyclone had ended but the wet weather had not.

6. Two Bay storms in a week

6.1 Arnab, only days earlier

Murasu did not arrive in isolation. Only days earlier, Cyclone Arnab had struck further north near Kakinada, with reported winds up to about 150 kilometres an hour at its landfall in late October. Two severe storms in the same basin within about a week strain the same systems twice: the same district administrations, the same power-restoration crews, the same shelter networks and the same farming communities are asked to prepare, endure and recover in quick succession. It also complicates the accounting, because damage surveyors must separate what Arnab broke from what Murasu broke, and because a road or embankment weakened by the first storm may fail more easily in the second. Anyone comparing the two storms should therefore compare them as separate events with separate tracks, not as a single prolonged disaster.

6.2 A first for a Tamil name

Murasu also carried a naming footnote that drew attention beyond the weather. It was reported as the first tropical cyclone named using a Tamil word under the regional naming protocol for the North Indian Ocean, a system in which member countries contribute names in rotation. Cyclone names are chosen long before a storm forms, and they are meant to be short, distinctive and easy to communicate in warnings. That a Tamil word was used for the first time is therefore a small piece of history inside a larger, damaging event — worth recording, but not something that changed the storm’s track, strength or impact. The name’s origin does not alter the physics of the surge or the rain; it only changes the word that radio bulletins and phone alerts carried into coastal homes.

7. Life after landfall: power, roads and farms

7.1 Restoration and the return home

The days after a landfall are dominated by unglamorous, essential work: clearing fallen trees from roads, restoring power lines, pumping out waterlogged streets, checking drinking-water supplies and reopening schools that were used as shelters. Official accounts of Murasu’s aftermath did not, in the early reporting, give a single consolidated figure for homes damaged, people sheltered or power connections restored, and that absence is itself informative — it shows how fragmented early information is when several districts are reporting at once. What can be said is that the pattern of damage, coastal wind and surge damage near Ongole plus inland rain damage across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, points to two different restoration tasks running in parallel: repairing what the wind broke at the coast, and draining and assessing what the water damaged inland.

7.2 What farmers and fishing families face next

For farming and fishing families, the next questions are practical and slow-moving. Salt water on a field, standing water on a paddy crop, a damaged boat or torn nets, and a lost stored harvest each have different remedies and different compensation procedures, and each depends on a survey that takes time. The early damage estimate gives a scale for the state’s response, but individual households will experience the recovery as a series of small decisions: whether a crop can be salvaged, whether a boat can be repaired before the next fishing season, whether a damaged roof can be patched before the next rain. Those decisions are where a cyclone’s aftermath is actually lived, long after the bulletins stop and the system’s name leaves the forecast maps.

8. What remains unconfirmed and what to watch next

8.1 Figures still to verify

Several figures in this account remain reported rather than finally confirmed, and readers should hold them in that light. The precise landfall window differs between published accounts, as noted above. The full, audited damage total for Andhra Pradesh — and any separate Telangana figure — has not yet been published in the early reporting. The circumstances of the two reported deaths, the district-wise breakdown of the damage, the final rainfall totals once all stations have reported, and the number of people sheltered or evacuated all remain to be confirmed by district and state authorities. The seawater-intrusion distance around Ongole and the exact peak wind at landfall are likewise reported values awaiting the department’s post-storm verification.

8.2 What to watch next

What happens next is mostly administrative and meteorological routine, but it matters. Watch for the state’s revised damage assessment and any relief announcements that follow it; for the department’s post-storm summary, which will settle the track, peak intensity and rainfall record; for district reports on restoration of power, roads and water supply; and for the regular forecasts for Telangana and Andhra Pradesh over the following days, which will show whether the remnant low’s moisture produces any further heavy spells. Murasu’s story, in the end, is a reminder that a cyclone’s end is not a single moment: it is a gradual fading, from severe storm to depression to low to a line in a forecast — and the work of counting, repairing and replanting continues well after the name has gone.

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