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Cyclone Chido has killed at least 34 people in Mozambique since it made landfall on Sunday, the UN aid agency OCHA said on Tuesday, citing data from the southern African country’s disaster agency.
“As of 17 December 2024, a total of 174,158 people are estimated to have been affected, with 34 deaths and 319 injuries,” OCHA said in a statement.
Mozambique’s National Institute for Risk and Disaster Management (INGD) called the situation “heartbreaking”, the BBC reportedand said the death toll would rise. An INGD spokesman told the BBC that most of those killed were hit by falling objects, such as destroyed brick walls.
Chido also destroyed or damaged 35,000 houses, hit nine schools and 10 health facilities, according to preliminary reports by the Southern African Development Community Center for Humanitarian and Emergency Operations.
Drone footage from Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province shows flattened thatched-roof houses near the coast and personal belongings scattered under the few palm trees still standing.
Electricity and communications have also been disrupted — the state-owned electricity company Electricidade de Moçambique has announced that around 200,000 customers are currently without power.
Thousands potentially dead in Mayotte
Chido reached Mozambique after causing chaos in Mayotte, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean and France’s poorest overseas territory.
Hundreds or even thousands could be dead in Mayotte, which was hit hardest by Cyclone Chido, French officials said. It is the strongest storm to hit the area in 90 years.
So far, 22 deaths and around 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 Bouéni M’titi-Labattoir high school in the town of Dzaouza, told Reuters when asked about the fate of his students: “It is impossible to find them all.
“Many of them live in a nearby slum, no one can go there.”
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the Red Crescent said the death toll was likely much higher as around a third of the island’s population was still missing due to poor communications.
“It’s a small island with a population of 300,000, and since the cyclone disrupted electricity, internet and phone lines, about 100,000 people are still missing,” IFRC communications manager Nora Peter told Reuters.
It may be days before the full extent of the destruction is revealed. For now, basic goods, medical and technical personnel and police were arriving via airlift with La Reunion, the territory’s only lifeblood.
“Today the priority is water and food,” said Mayor Soumaila. “There are people who have unfortunately died where the bodies are starting to decompose which can create a sanitation problem.”
“We don’t have electricity. When night falls, there are people who take advantage of that situation.”
dr. Claudia Lodesani of Médecins Sans Frontières said restoring access to drinking water is crucial to prevent outbreaks of cholera and other diseases.
France’s interior minister arrived in Mayotte on Monday after Cyclone Chido devastated large parts of the East African archipelago, with fears of a significant death toll in the densely populated territory.
“An epidemic is not imminent, but there is a very high risk,” she said, saying that even before the storm, access to clean water and health services was difficult in the slums, where many immigrants live.
“France will quickly repair the hospital, but the situation in the slums is worrying,” Lodesani said.
More than three quarters of Mayotte’s 321,000 inhabitants live in relative poverty. According to statistics agency INSEE for 2021, Mayotte has an annual median disposable income of just over €3,000 (about Cdn 4,500) per inhabitant, roughly eight times less than the Île-de-France region around Paris.
Concerns about undocumented immigrants
In mainland France, the disaster has fueled a political row over immigration, the environment and France’s relationship with overseas territories.
Mayotte has struggled with unrest in recent years, with many residents angry at illegal immigration – mostly from nearby Comoros and Madagascar – and inflation.
Undocumented immigration has increased Mayotte’s population by around 100,000 in the past 10 years, and the territory has become a stronghold of the far-right National Rally.
Acting French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, of the conservative Republican Party, told a press conference in Mayotte that the early warning system worked “perfectly” but many undocumented did not make it to designated shelters.
Other officials said undocumented migrants may have been afraid to go to shelters for fear of being arrested.
Left-wing politicians pointed the finger at what they called the government’s neglect of Mayotte and its failure to prepare for natural disasters linked to climate change.
Meanwhile, France’s interior ministry said a curfew would take effect Tuesday night from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. local time.
