Cyclone Chido brought strong winds of up to 225 km/h to French overseas territories. The element reached Category 4 and reached islands between Africa and Madagascar over the weekend. Forecasters said it was the most powerful disaster of its kind to hit the region in more than 90 years.
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Cyclone Chido hit the archipelago. “We lost everything”
BBC forecaster Sarah Keith-Lucas said the cyclone brought powerful winds and stormy rain to the tropical island, reaching heights of 4 to 8 meters in the north.
After the cyclone passed and the situation calmed down on Monday, authorities were only just beginning to fully grasp the full extent of the archipelago's destruction. Rescue teams have yet to reach some places. “The next few minutes and hours will be very important,” French civil service spokesman Alexandre Juassal said.
“The situation is catastrophic and apocalyptic,” Bruno Garcia, owner of the Caribou Hotel in Mayotte's capital Mahmud, told BFMTV television. “We lost everything. The whole hotel was completely destroyed, there's nothing left. It's like an atomic bomb fell on Mayotte,” Garcia said.
The cyclone damaged thousands of buildings, including the island's main hospital, making it difficult to rescue the injured. French Health Minister Geneviève Dariussec told France 2 television that local health services have been “severely affected” by this element, severely hampering access to care.
The greatest damage to hospitals was caused by water, destroying treatment rooms, intensive care units, obstetrics, and emergency departments, among others. Mobile medical points have been deployed at the scene.
French President Emmanuel Macron chairs the United Nations Council of Crisis Officers. 17:00. Interior Minister Bruno Lutailot went to Mayotte.
Cyclone Chido devastated the island. “The whole neighborhood is gone.”
The scale of the destruction is so great that many Mayotte residents are suffering from lack of food, water and shelter. One Mamouzou resident reported by the BBC said he had been without water for three days and did not know when the water supply would be restored.
Another Mamzuu resident, Mohamed Ishmael, told Reuters the situation was dire: “It feels like a nuclear war broke out here. I saw the whole area disappear.”
The disaster hit the poorest people
Mayotte is the poorest region in France. Approximately 75 percent of residents live below the poverty line, and statistically one in three people are unemployed. Many of the island's 300,000 residents live here in slums and also in houses made of corrugated iron and other weak materials that had no chance of surviving in the face of the cyclone.
More than a dozen people have been confirmed dead so far, but authorities expect the toll to be much higher, saying, “I think the death toll could be in the hundreds or even closer to a thousand.'' “Given the brutality of this event, there could probably be several thousand people,” he told Governor Mayotte-François-Xavier Vieuxville of Mayotte La Télévision 1aire.
The cyclone reached the African coast of Mozambique after passing through the archipelago on Sunday. There he left three people dead. Forecasters expect heavy rain to fall in Malawi on Monday as a result of the cyclone.
Cyclone Chid was extremely strong because the surface of the Indian Ocean had heated up, said Francois Gouland, a meteorologist at Météo France.
Sarah Keith-Lucas added that this is a result of a warming climate. For every additional degree Celsius, 7% more CO accumulates in the atmosphere. More humidity. This means that a storm such as 1,000 degrees will produce 7% more heavy rain. than before. The warmer the ocean water is, the more energy it stores and releases during this type of phenomenon.
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