Families on Monday were still searching for relatives, two days after a storm devastated the French territory of Mayotte off the eastern coast of Africa, and there were fears that the actual death toll would be far higher than the official figure of 14.
Tropical Storm Chido destroyed homes, schools and businesses with wind gusts of up 124 miles per hour. Forecasters said that it was the worst storm in 90 years to hit the territory.
President Emmanuel Macron called an emergency meeting in Paris for Monday evening to coordinate the government’s response, and France started aid flights from Réunion, another French territory in the region.
“I think that there will be several hundred” deaths, François-Xavier Bieuville, France’s top-ranking representative on Mayotte, told a local news channel.
“Maybe we will be closer to a thousand, maybe several thousand,” added Mr. Bieuville.
France’s interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, said from Mayotte on Monday that it would take days to establish the true toll of the storm.
The interior ministry cautioned that officials would likely be unable to count all the victims because many residents are Muslims, who traditionally try to bury their dead within 24 hours. And about a third of the territory’s 320,000 people are undocumented, the ministry said, adding to the challenge of compiling an accurate toll.
“These elements mean that the number of deaths that are officially counted will probably be much lower than reality,” the ministry said.
Geneviève Darrieussecq, the outgoing French health minister, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sunday that the health system had been seriously affected and access to care had been “seriously degraded.” She gave the official death toll of 14 in a television interview on Monday morning.
Many in Mayotte, France’s poorest territory, were already struggling before Chido hit on Saturday. About 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, five times more than the percentage in the rest of France.
Many people live in crowded shanty towns, which were hit especially hard. Videos and photos showed the destruction: Homes were destroyed, debris was strewn about hillsides and trees had been ripped apart by wind.
As families in Mayotte dug through the wreckage on Monday, many also posted desperate pleas on a Facebook page to try to find missing loved ones. Some ended their posts with a statement of solidarity: “Force à tous,” or stay strong.
But news was slow coming. Mobile and internet networks are disrupted, according to French news reports. Outages kept Mayotte almost entirely offline for more than 36 hours, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group.
“Some shanty towns were completely devastated,” Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of Mamoudzou, the capital of Mayotte, told BFMTV on Sunday.
He described “scenes of total chaos” with widespread power cuts and blocked roads.
Mayotte has also recently become a focal point for broader French debates around immigration. The archipelago’s population has grown rapidly in recent years, straining social services.
In great part, that increase comes from an influx of undocumented immigrants, many of whom come from the Comoros, a neighboring archipelago, which is one of the world’s poorest countries.
In February, the French interior minister tried to make Mayotte less attractive to immigrants by pushing to end birthright citizenship there. The effort, which some argued was a serious breach of French values that would do little to deter would-be migrants, came to a halt when Mr. Macron called snap elections this summer.
A bill introduced in September that proposes similar changes has yet to be discussed by the lower house of Parliament in France.
Mozambique also suffered serious damage, although the death toll appears lower: Chido killed at least three people, according to an early estimate, local officials told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
Chido made landfall in Mozambique on Sunday with winds equivalent to those of a Category 3 hurricane, according to the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center. The storm, which has since been downgraded to a depression, has continued to move southwest.
It is expected to dissipate by Tuesday, and wind speeds have dropped to 30 miles per hour. Now, the main threat is rainfall, which could cause flash floods or dangerous mudslides.
Guy Taylor, the spokesman in Mozambique for the United Nations Children’s Fund, said that aid teams were traveling to rural areas throughout the northern part of Mozambique on Monday to assess the situation.
The organization fears that many of those communities — which already had low access to clean water and sanitation — would be susceptible to cholera outbreaks.
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