Officially and very provisionally, the human toll in Mayotte is 31 dead and some 2,500 injured. “It is likely that there are many more victims”recognized Emmanuel Macron, who left the archipelago at midday this Friday.
Already, twenty-four hours after the passage of Cyclone Chido, the prefect of the island, François-Xavier Bieuville, said that the count, of 14 dead at that time, « [n’était] not plausible when we see the images of the slums and the violence of this event”he explained to the Mayotte television news La 1ère. “I think the final toll is much heavier. Probably several hundred, maybe a thousand, or even a few thousand. » It will be difficult to have an official count, because, he specified, “Muslim tradition is to bury people within twenty-four hours.”
Two elements suggest that the results will be “way too heavy”as the resigning Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, said on BFM-TV and RMC on Wednesday. The shanty towns of the archipelago, which housed at least 100,000 people, the majority of them illegal foreigners, for 320,000 inhabitants officially registered in Mayotte, have all been razed. Thousands of sheet metal boxes were blown away and carried away.
Furthermore, in 2019, faced with Cyclone Belna which threatened the island and promised to be violent – it ultimately spared it – projections by state services anticipated between 20,000 and 30,000 deaths, and even 50,000. , according to the most pessimistic experts.
