Double Trouble in Odisha: The Lingipur Inferno & The Yellow Skies

Townhall Times, New Delhi

Reporter: Bhavika Kalra

By: Regional Crisis Desk | Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Bhubaneswar didn’t sleep much last night. While firefighters were battling a 14-hour inferno at a massive supermarket, the IMD was busy lighting up the map with Yellow Alerts for a dozen districts. Here is the unfiltered breakdown.

1. The Lingipur Mega-Fire: 40 Tenders & A Robot

The fire at the Super Mart near Dhauli Lingipur wasn’t just a “incident”; it was a structural disaster that started around 10:30 PM Monday and raged well into Tuesday morning.

The Scale: Over 40 fire tenders were deployed. Because the building was a “blind box” with no windows, the Fire Force had to smash through the fourth-floor walls just to get water inside.
The High-Tech Fight: For the first time in recent memory, the department deployed a Robotic Monitor. But even the machine struggled—the extreme heat from melting plastic and rubber goods on the fourth floor made it nearly impossible to suppress the flames from the inside.
The Damage: Thousands of square feet of plastic, steel, and household goods are now just a pile of ash. Property losses are estimated in the millions.
Status: No casualties reported, but the building has developed massive cracks, raising serious questions about structural integrity and fire safety violations.

2. The Lightning Trap: Yellow Alert Issued

Just as the fire crews were packing up, the weather turned. The IMD has slapped a Yellow Warning on Odisha for Tuesday, February 24.

The districts: Angul, Dhenkanal, Jajpur, Bhadrak, Kendrapara, Jagatsinghpur, Cuttack, Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, and Balasore.
The Threat: We aren’t just talking about rain. This is about Thunderstorms with Lightning and gusty winds reaching 30–40 kmph.
The Forecast: A low-pressure system over the Bay of Bengal is pushing moisture inland. While coastal Odisha is seeing “Nowcast” alerts for light rain, the real danger is the lightning strikes that have already begun in the interior belts.

[Image: A weather radar map showing the movement of a thundercloud cell over the Khordha-Cuttack twin-city belt, with lightning strike icons.]

3. Operational Impact: What to Watch

Sector	Current Status	Impact
Transport	Cautious	Waterlogging in Cuttack’s low-lying areas (Badambadi/Khan Nagar) slowing down bus traffic.
Power	Unstable	Precautionary power cuts in Lingipur area due to the fire; lightning-related outages in northern districts.
Fisheries	Restricted	Fishermen warned to stay away from the North-West Bay of Bengal for the next 24 hours.

The Bottom Line

The fire department is exhausted, and the weather department is on edge. If you are in the “Twin City” area, the smoke from the Lingipur fire is still hanging low due to the high humidity and rain, making air quality in the southern outskirts pretty miserable today.