The death toll from Cyclone Chido in Mozambique has risen to 75, the government said on Friday, nearly doubling the previously reported number.
Rescue workers have scrambled to reach areas that the storm had cut off. The cyclone made landfall early this week in the country’s northern province of Cabo Delgado, a region that was already in turmoil after a yearslong insurgency backed by the Islamic State.
The storm killed at least 69 people in the province and injured 740 others, according to Mozambique’s National Institute for Natural Disasters. Some of the deaths were reported as rescue workers made their way to rural areas, struggling over dirt roads that the cyclone had washed away.
In the district of Mecufi, most buildings were destroyed, according to a report compiled by the government and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“What you see is utter destruction,” Isadora Zoni, a reporting officer for the United Nations’ refugee agency, said in an interview after visiting Mecufi and other affected areas. “Everything’s been flattened.”
Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries and one of the worst-affected by climate change, the country’s government has said. It is routinely battered by storms in the southern Indian Ocean.
When Cyclone Chido hit, the walls of mud homes were washed away and houses made of wood were reduced to a pile of sticks, images provided by Ms. Zoni showed. The corrugated-iron roof of the district’s maternity health clinic was ripped away and beds and equipment inside were overturned. Crumpled schoolbooks were all that remained inside a classroom reduced to rubble.
In Cabo Delgado province, hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes after a series of attacks by the insurgents. In the Chiure district, the storm affected at least 10,000 people who were living in tents, Ms. Zoni said.
People whose lives were already upended by conflict, she said, now have “their situation compounded by climate shocks.”
As Cyclone Chido hurtled across the southern Indian Ocean, it brought wind speeds of 115 miles per hour, equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean. It also pummeled Mayotte, a French archipelago off the eastern coast of Africa, where the authorities have recorded a death toll of at least 31. Many more are feared dead.
The storm then made landfall in Mozambique before dissipating over landlocked Zimbabwe.
“Cyclone Chido may signal the start of an intense and destructive rainy season, which has historically brought cyclones and severe flooding to the region,” the U.N. refugee agency said in a report.
Last year, Tropical Cyclone Freddy, a record-breaking storm, left dozens dead in Mozambique. In 2022, Cyclone Gombe left 63 people dead in the country. In recent years, nearly 140,000 people have fled their homes because of extreme weather in Mozambique, according to the refugee agency.
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