on November 10. The storm further intensified into a severe cyclonic storm on November 11 and began to turn towards the northeast, as it approached the head of the bay. It developed a clear eye and reached its peak intensity later that day, with three-minute sustained winds of , one-minute sustained winds of , and a central pressure of 960 hPa. The cyclone made landfall on the East Pakistan coastline during the evening of November 12, around the same time as the local high tide. Once over land, the system began to weaken; the storm degraded to a cyclonic storm on November 13, when it was about south-southeast of Agartala. The storm then rapidly weakened into a remnant low over southern Assam that evening. Preparations There is question as to how much of the information about the cyclone said to have been received by Indian weather authorities was transmitted to East Pakistan authorities. This is because the Indian and East Pakistani weather services may not have shared information given the Indo-Pakistani friction at the time. A large part of the population was reportedly taken by surprise by the storm. There were indications that East Pakistan's storm warning system was not used properly. The Pakistan Meteorological Department issued a report calling for "danger preparedness" in the vulnerable coastal regions during the day on November 12. As the storm neared the coast, a "great danger signal" was broadcast on Radio Pakistan. Survivors later said that this meant little to them, but that they had recognised a No. 1 warning signal as representing the greatest possible threat. Following two previously destructive cyclones in October 1960 which killed at least 16,000 people in East Pakistan, the Pakistani central government contacted the American government for assistance in developing a system to avert future disasters. Gordon Dunn, the director of the National Hurricane Center at the time, carried out a detailed study and submitted his report in 1961. However, the central government did not carry out all of the recommendations Dunn had listed. Impact Although the North Indian Ocean is the least active of the tropical cyclone basins, the coast of the Bay of Bengal is particularly vulnerable to the effects of tropical cyclones. The exact death toll from the Bhola cyclone will never be known, but at least 300,000 fatalities were associated with the storm, possibly as many as 500,000. The cyclone was not, however,