Families on Monday were desperately searching for their relatives, two days after a storm devastated the French territory of Mayotte off the eastern coast of Africa. Officials fear that the actual death toll would be far higher than the official figure of 14.
Tropical Storm Chido destroyed homes, schools and businesses on the tiny island, with wind gusts of up to 124 miles per hour. Forecasters said that it was the worst storm in 90 years to hit the territory.
France’s president Emmanuel Macron led an emergency meeting in Paris on Monday evening to coordinate the government’s response. France has 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.”
The interior ministry cautioned that officials would likely be unable to count all the victims. About a third of the territory’s 320,000 people are undocumented, the ministry said, which could complicate official tallies. Also, many residents are Muslims, who traditionally try to bury their dead within 24 hours.
“These elements mean that the number of deaths that are officially counted will probably be much lower than reality,” the ministry said.
On Monday, as rescue workers and security personnel arrived in Mayotte, distributing enough clean water was a main concern.
“There are people who haven’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday,” Salama Ramia, a French senator who represents Mayotte, told BFMTV on Monday from the archipelago.
In recent weeks, authorities enforced temporary restrictions on water use on the archipelago. Mayotte experienced its worst drought in over two decades last year, which led to protests over accusations of mismanagement and frustrations with cuts to service.
Ms. Ramia said many areas had no electricity, no phone network, and barely any food and water. She said emergency workers had not yet been able to reach some neighborhoods that had been razed to the ground, adding to uncertainty about the death toll.
“We have no news from our families,” she said.
Mayotte, France’s poorest territory, was already struggling before the storm hit on Saturday. Mayotte’s healthcare system is “on its last legs,” according to a 2022 Senate report, with a single overburdened hospital and a severe shortage of doctors.
Geneviève Darrieussecq, the outgoing French health minister, told French television on Monday morning that the official death toll was 14 people so far. She also said that Mayotte’s hospital had been “seriously damaged” and that access to care had become extremely difficult after the storm.
About 80 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, five times more than the percentage in the rest of France. Many are crowded into 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.
“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 recently become a focal point for broader French debates around immigration. The population has grown rapidly, which has strained social services. And French security officials have intervened in recent years to try to crack down on illegal immigration and unsanitary housing.
Much of the increase comes from an influx of undocumented immigrants, many of whom come from Comoros, a neighboring archipelago, which is one of the poorest countries in the world.
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.
Mozambique also suffered serious damage, although the death toll there appears lower: Chido killed at least three people, according to an early estimate, local officials told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
The storm, which has since been downgraded to a depression, is expected to dissipate by Tuesday.
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 the country 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.
On Monday, families in Mayotte were still trying to reach relatives, even though mobile and internet networks were disrupted. Outages kept Mayotte almost entirely offline for more than 36 hours, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group.
Many people posted desperate pleas on a Facebook page to try to find loved ones. Some ended their posts with a statement of solidarity: “Force à tous,” or stay strong.
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