After Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley stated she expected the airport to resume operational in the “next six to 12 hours,” following the shutdown prompted by a category 4 hurricane, the Indian team is scheduled to depart on a charter flight on Tuesday evening.
Due to Hurricane Beryl, which made landfall on the island on Sunday night, the T20 World Cup winning team, its support staff, a few BCCI officials, and the players’ families have been stuck in Barbados for the last two days.
“I don’t want to speak in advance of it, but I have literally been in touch with the airport personnel and they’re doing their last checks now and we want to resume normal operations as a matter of urgency,” Mottley said to PTI.
Many folks had scheduled their departures for late last night, this morning, or tomorrow morning. And we want to make sure we can help those people, so I would guess that the airport will open in the next six to twelve hours.”
A source said that the Indian contingent is scheduled to depart Bridgetown at 6 p.m. local time and arrive in Delhi around 7:45 p.m. IST on Wednesday. The date for prime minister Narendra Modi’s subsequent felicitation of the players has not yet been determined.
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The Indian team has a short window of time to depart Bridgetown because, as Mottley stated, “we have another hurricane coming on Wednesday.”
For a five-match T20I series in Zimbabwe, Rinku Singh, Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shivam Dube, Khaleel Ahmed, and Sanju Samson are the five players scheduled to travel. The remaining members of the team for the series departed India early on Tuesday.
On Monday, storms and wind that could have killed anyone pounded Barbados and neighbouring islands. Nearly 300,000 people live in the nation, and since Sunday night, it has been under lockdown.
“[We have] been working to ensure that everyone is safe in Barbados, Barbadians and all of the visitors, of course, who came for the cricket World Cup,” added Mottley. The storm’s avoidance of land was a great blessing for us. Because the hurricane was 80 miles south of us, there was less devastation on land. It is evident that there has been significant damage to both coastal assets and infrastructure.
“It could have been a lot worse, but now is the time to do the recovery and the clean-up.”
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