Emergency workers scrambled to rescue survivors on Monday from the wreckage of homes, hospitals, schools and businesses in Mayotte, a French archipelago in the Indian Ocean that was devastated by Tropical Cyclone Chido over the weekend.
At least 14 people were killed and more than 250 were injured in Mayotte, France’s poorest territory, according to preliminary figures, as French news outlets described “an unrecognizable island” and officials warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.
There were fears that the actual death toll could be far higher. “I think that there will be several hundred” deaths, François-Xavier Bieuville, France’s top-ranking representative on the archipelago, 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’s main island on Monday that it would take days to establish a death toll. President Emmanuel Macron has convened an emergency meeting for Monday evening.
Chido was the worst storm to hit Mayotte in 90 years, according to forecasters, who said that wind gusts exceeded 124 miles per hour.
The storm also killed at least three people in Mozambique, according to an early estimate of the death toll, local officials told the French news agency Agence France-Presse.
Mayotte, which has about 300,000 people, is north of Madagascar. It has the highest population density of France’s overseas territories, with a total area of 145 square miles.
Videos posted by French news outlets showed devastated neighborhoods there, strewn with debris and uprooted trees. Outages caused by the storm kept Mayotte almost entirely offline for more than 36 hours, according to NetBlocks, an internet monitoring group.
“The health system is seriously affected and access to care has been seriously degraded,” Geneviève Darrieussecq, the outgoing French health minister, wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sunday. She gave the official death toll in a television interview on Monday morning.
Chido made landfall on Sunday in Mozambique, just south of the city of Pemba, with winds equivalent to those of a Category 3 hurricane, according to the United States military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center.
Several buildings were also destroyed, the officials said. The region also experienced telecommunications outages, NetBlocks said on Sunday.
Officials at aid agencies operating in Mozambique, including UNICEF and the Red Cross, said they were on the ground ahead of the storm, and boats were prepared for search-and-rescue operations.
Guy Taylor, the spokesman in Mozambique for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, said he saw significant damage from the storm in Pemba, the capital of the country’s northernmost province, Cabo Delgado.
“We saw many roofs torn off buildings, electricity and communications infrastructure out of action,” he said in a text message. “And the situation is likely to be significantly worse in surrounding rural areas, where homes and other buildings are very rudimentary.”
UNICEF had already brought large quantities of supplies like medication, water purification tablets and flashlights to the province before the storm, Mr. Taylor said.
Now that the storm has passed, UNICEF teams were traveling to rural areas throughout the northern part of the country on Monday to assess the situation, he said. They fear that many of these communities, which already had low access to clean water and sanitation, would be susceptible to cholera outbreaks, he said.
The storm was weakening on Monday as it moved inland, according to a forecast from Météo-France, the official French meteorological administration, which said that Chido was now a moderate tropical storm and was expected to evolve into a depression.
Still, the forecast said, it could bring strong winds and heavy thunderstorms to southern Malawi and neighboring provinces in Mozambique.
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