Backergunge Cyclone

India, October 28–November 1, 1876 

Viewed by a number of contemporary historians as the single-most-violent cyclone to have blasted across the Bay of Bengal during the 19th century, the Backergunge Cyclone delivered sustained 147-MPH (237-km/h) winds, flooding rains, and a remarkable storm tidestorm surge combination to the northeast coast of India between October 31 and November 1, 1876. Some 100,000 people, many of them residents of the obliterated delta city of Backergunge (now Barisal, Bangladesh), reportedly perished during the cyclone’s initial landfall there, while an additional 100,000 people in surrounding regions soon succumbed to the dehydrating ravages of an ensuing cholera epidemic. A significant death toll in a land of deadly cyclone strikes, the Backergunge Cyclone was by far the most disastrous tropical cyclone to have affected India since Calcutta lost 300,000 residents to the colossal Hooghly River Cyclone of October 7, 1737.

The Backergunge Cyclone originated over the central Bay of Bengal, approximately 265 miles (426 km) northwest of the Andaman Islands, on October 28, 1876. Plotted in 1889 by cyclone scholar John Eliot, the storm’s course took it steadily north-northwest, away from the islands and into the warm, open waters of the bay. There, fed by the strong southwesterly air currents that accompanied that summer’s monsoon’s retreat, the cyclone deepened very quickly.

By the afternoon of October 29, a ship passing close to the cyclone’s burgeoning eye recorded a barometric pressure reading of 29.02 inches (982 mb), one that produced wind speeds of 74 MPH (119 km/h) or higher and considerable rains. During the early morning hours of October 30, as 100-MPH (161-km/h) gusts lashed the middle of the Bay of Bengal, the Backergunge Cyclone slightly altered its course and began to head almost due north at approximately 13 MPH (21 km/h). Again encountering shipping later that afternoon, the cyclone chalked up a pressure reading of 28.00 inches (948 mb), elevating it to the status of a major system. As the storm’s pressure gradient rapidly steepened and jacked its sustained winds to 128 MPH (206 km/h), its swirling storm surge—the dome of seawater that it carried beneath its eyewall—began to loom ever larger. Though just a swell in deep water, the shoaling shores of the narrowing bay forced the cyclone’s approaching 40-foot (12-m) surge to build on itself, cresting as friction with the seabed retarded its forward motion.

To the Backergunge storm surge’s growth, however, was shortly added a further critical element, that of the high lunar tides normally experienced in the Bay of Bengal. On the morning of October 31, as the cyclone neared to within 150 miles (241 km) of India’s northeastern coast, the first tide’s ebb had just ended, and a 12-hour flow of water back into the bay began. Still moving due north at nearly 11 MPH (18 km/h), the cyclone’s 40-mile-wide (48 km) surge inexorably swirled onward, compressing the rising tide against the walls of the Asian subcontinent. To the Burmese east and the Indian west, the tide that day rolled ashore as a series of enormous breakers, pounding waves that roared and hissed as they penetrated echoing coves and inlets.

But directly to the north, where the Megna River greeted the Bay of Bengal with a fragile delta fan, the situation was worsening by the hour. In the bayside anchorages of Backergunge, a city of jute and rice traders located 150 miles (241 km) due east of Calcutta, the tide came in as it should, but this time it did not go out. Rising throughout the afternoon of October 31, sometimes at a rate of two feet per hour, the tide eventually began to lap at the underside of piers, running as widening rivulets over the tops of the crude embankments that protected the prosperous city from the Megna’s periodic floods. Hawser lines parted with a bang as heavily laden merchant ships suddenly rose on the tide, strained and listed at their piers until crew members cut them free with axes. Forced to beat to seaward against a stiffening southwest wind, many of the vessels were still clearing the mouth of the

Megna River when the cyclone’s surge came ashore some five hours later.