BIZZARE: When AP villages got covered in foot-thick ice!

Either it was freak weather or yet another example of climate change fallout. Several villages in the vicinity of Hyderabad found themselves covered with snow. Mohammed Siddique reports.

While other areas including Hyderabad were lashed by sudden showers on Tuesday night. Areas around Chevella town of Ranga Reddy district were hit by an unusually intense hail storm and seven villages wore a white sheet of snow leaving the local people and officials astounded.

The hail storm was so heavy that Kummera and other villages, only 100 kilometres away from Hyderabad were covered with a foot-thick sheet of snow causing extensive damages and killing animals.

Local revenue official Ch Ravinder Reddy said that the storm resulted in damages to the standing crops on thousands of acres of lands and claimed hundreds of live stock.  

The villages hit by the snow, Mudimyal, Rabulapally, Malkapur, Kummera, Gollapally, Yankapally and Kommeta come under Chevella, earlier represented by home minister P Sabita Indra Reddy in the state assembly.

Reddy said that government was sending a special team of officials to undertake enumeration of losses as several houses were also damaged because of the storm. She said she had received several phone calls from the panic-stricken residents of the area.

A day after the storm, workers were trying to clear the ice from the villages, while the weather officials in Hyderabad were not in a position to comment on the freak phenomenon.

They said that snowing in the region was out of question and even if there was a hailstorm, so much ice can not fall.

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This is not firs time that a part of Telangana region in Andhra Pradesh has witnessed this sort of a phenomenon. Adilabad town bordering Maharashtra was also hit by a similar freak weather more than a decade ago.

As big pieces of ice fell from the sky, the ground was covered with more than two-foot thick ice sheets, houses had suffered extensive damages. "It was a phenomenon which we will never be able to forget," one of the residents of Adilabad recalled saying.

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