At least 34 people have been killed by Cyclone Chido in Mozambique since it made landfall there on Sunday, the UN humanitarian agency OCHA said on Tuesday, citing figures from the southern African country’s disaster agency.
“As of Dec.17, 2024, a total of 174,158 people were estimated to be impacted, with 34 people dead and 319 injured,” OCHA said in a statement.
Mozambique’s National Institute of Risk and Disaster Management (INGD) called the situation “heart-breaking,” reported the BBC, and said the death toll will rise. An INGD spokesperson told the BBC that most of those killed were hit by falling objects, like from destroyed brick walls.
Chido also destroyed or damaged 35,000 houses, affected nine schools and 10 health facilities, according to preliminary reports by the Southern African Development Community’s Humanitarian and Emergency Operations Centre.
Drone footage from Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province showed razed thatched-roof houses near the coast and personal belongings scattered under the few palm trees still standing.
Electricity and communications have also been upended — state-owned power company Electricidade de Moçambique announced that around 200,000 customers are currently without power.
Thousands potentially dead in Mayotte
Chido made landfall in Mozambique after wreaking havoc in Mayotte, an Indian Ocean archipelago and France’s poorest overseas territory.
Hundreds or even thousands could be dead in Mayotte, which took the strongest hit from Cyclone Chido, French officials have said. It’s the strongest storm to hit the territory in 90 years.
So far, 22 deaths and about 1,400 injuries have been confirmed, Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of the capital Mamoudzou, told Radio France Internationale. But many parts of Mayotte are still inaccessible and some victims were buried before their deaths could be officially counted.
Mathieu Gouzou, a sports teacher at the Bouéni M’titi-Labattoir middle school in the town of Dzaouzi told Reuters when asked about the fate of his pupils: “It’s impossible to find them all.
“Many of them live in the shantytown nearby, nobody can go there.”
The International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Crescent Societies said the number of victims was likely to be much higher as about a third of the island’s population was still unaccounted for because of bad communications.
“It’s a small island with 300,000 inhabitants, and because the cyclone has disturbed the electricity, the connection of the internet and the phone lines, about 100,000 people are still unaccounted for,” IFRC communications manager Nora Peter told Reuters.
It may take days to discover the full extent of the destruction. For the time being, essential goods, medical and technical staff and police were arriving via the air bridge with La Reunion, the territory’s only lifeline.
“The priority today is water and food,” Mayor Soumaila said. “There are people who have unfortunately died where the bodies are starting to decompose that can create a sanitary problem.”
“We don’t have electricity. When night falls, there are people who take advantage of that situation.”
Dr. Claudia Lodesani of Doctors without Borders said it was crucial to restore access to drinking water to avert the outbreak of cholera and other diseases.
France’s interior minister arrived in Mayotte on Monday after Cyclone Chido devastated large parts of the archipelago off east Africa, with a significant death toll feared in the densely packed territory.
“An epidemic is not inevitable, but there is a very high risk,” she said, saying that even before the storm access to clear water and health services was difficult in shantytowns, where many immigrants live.
“France will repair the hospital quickly, but the situation in the shantytowns is worrying,” Lodesani said.
More than three-quarters of Mayotte’s 321,000 people live in relative poverty. According to 2021 figures from statistics agency INSEE, Mayotte has an annual median disposable income of just over 3,000 euros (about $4,500 Cdn) per inhabitant, roughly eight times less than the Île-de-France region around Paris.
Concerns about undocumented immigrants
In mainland France, the disaster fuelled a political row about immigration, the environment and France’s treatment of its overseas territories.
Mayotte has been grappling with unrest in recent years with many residents angry at illegal immigration — mostly from nearby Comoros and Madagascar — and inflation.
Undocumented immigration has driven Mayotte’s population up by an estimated 100,000 over the last 10 years, and the territory has become a stronghold for the far-right National Rally.
France’s acting interior minister Bruno Retailleau, from the conservative Republicans party, told a press conference in Mayotte that the early warning system had worked “perfectly” but many of the undocumented had not come to designated shelters.
Other officials have said undocumented migrants may have been afraid to go to shelters for fear of being arrested.
Left-wing politicians have pointed the finger at what they called the government’s neglect of Mayotte and failure to prepare for natural disasters linked to climate change.
In the meantime, France’s interior ministry said a curfew will go into effect on Tuesday night from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. local time.
