At least two deaths and “enormous” damage: tropical cyclone Chido and its extremely violent winds sowed desolation on Saturday in Mayotte, the poorest department in France, in the Indian Ocean.
In Kawéni, a neighborhood located in the commune of the Mahoran “capital” Mamoudzou, “everything was taken away, everything was razed”, Mounira, a resident of the largest French slum, lamented to AFP. house was destroyed.
Two people died in the Petite-Terre sector, the small island in the archipelago where Pamandzi airport is located, east of Mamoudzou, AFP learned from a security source.
Closed until further notice, the airport, where gusts reached 226 km/h according to Météo-France, has “suffered major damage, notably the control tower”, indicated on X the resigning Minister of Transport François Durovray .
“Traffic will initially be restored with military relief planes. Ships are engaged to ensure supplies,” he added.
Secours populaire, for its part, launched an appeal for donations.
The resigning Minister of the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, stressed on X that from Saturday evening an A400M plane would leave mainland France with humanitarian freight and civil security resources. It will be accompanied by a frigate and a helicopter.
“Many of us have lost everything,” lamented the prefect of the 101st French department, François-Xavier Bieuville, reporting the “most violent and destructive cyclone we have experienced since 1934.”
More than 15,000 homes are without electricity, tweeted the resigning Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher.
The situation also raises fears of severe water supply difficulties in an archipelago already subject to water cuts.
The new Prime Minister François Bayrou must participate in an interministerial crisis meeting in Paris in the evening, Matignon announced.
The alert level was lowered from purple to red to let help out, but the prefect called on the approximately 320,000 inhabitants of Mayotte to remain “confined” and “solidarity” in “this ordeal”. Communications with the territory remain very difficult.
Ibrahim Mcolo, a resident of Chiconi in the west of Grande-Terre, had taken refuge in his family's concrete house in Kangani, in the north of Grande-Terre. “I see all the neighbors' metal sheets flying away, cables torn out, the neighbor's banana tree on the ground. Even in our house which is well protected, the water comes in. I feel it shaking,” he described to AFP in the morning.
“The time has come for an emergency,” declared President Emmanuel Macron on X, assuring that “the whole country” was alongside the Mahorais. The resigning Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau announced a new dispatch on Sunday of 140 civil security soldiers and firefighters, bringing the personnel dispatched to the site to 250.
Technical services were active in the afternoon to clear the roads and allow emergency services to pass, according to the mayor of Mamoudzou, Ambdilwahedou Soumaila.
Some 1,600 police officers and gendarmes are deployed to help the population and “prevent possible looting”, we learned from those close to Bruno Retailleau.
– Heading for Mozambique –
around 2:30 p.m. local time (12:30 p.m. in Paris), the crisis unit set up at the prefecture had received calls from people “only injured”, but “the emergency services have not yet been able to access the heights of the city”, where are the most vulnerable residents, underlined the mayor of Mamoudzou.
Around 100,000 people living in “unsound housing”, particularly in sheet metal huts, had been identified in the archipelago by the authorities to be sheltered in more than 70 emergency accommodation centers.
The eye of the intense tropical cyclone passed over the north and northwest of Grande-Terre late in the morning. It then moved away to the west and weather conditions “improved rapidly” late in the afternoon on the archipelago, according to the meteorological services. Chido will nevertheless remain an “extremely dangerous cyclone over the next 18 to 24 hours”, and now threatens the coasts of Mozambique on the African continent.
The archipelago had been placed on purple cyclone alert at 5:00 a.m. local time (3:00 a.m. in Paris), implying “strict confinement of the entire population”, according to the prefecture.
Two of the Comoros islands, Anjouan – the closest to Mayotte – and Mohéli, were also affected, but much less severely. Mosques were flooded, kwasa (boats) swept away by the waves and homes damaged, reported Commander Abderemane Mahmoud of Comorian Civil Security.
