Despite the extent of the damage, the Mahorais intend to resume their lives quickly and it is above all his support that Emmanuel Macron arrives to provide them, this Thursday, December 19. While the government declared a state of “exceptional natural calamity” on the island and the freezing of prices of consumer products, the Head of State traveled “with a very restricted delegation” to avoid mobilizing a too large a police force, but above all four tonnes of food and health aid, as well as rescuers “who come to lend a hand to their comrades already engaged with the Mahorais”.
After an “aerial reconnaissance of the affected territory”, Emmanuel Macron went to the Mamoudzou hospital center (CHM), where he spoke with the nursing staff and the patients being treated. The president is now going “to a destroyed neighborhood, in contact with the emergency services” mobilized since the most intense cyclone to hit Mayotte in 90 years, where he will be able to see the damage of course, but also the emergency with which the population hastens to rebuild their prison habitats before the arrival of the rainy season.
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Finally, the President of the Republic must “discuss the situation of the island with elected officials” and specify the terms of the “national mourning” that he intends to decree, and begin to outline the titanic reconstruction project. .
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An extended visit
And if he was initially supposed to leave at the end of the day for Djibouti, where he must share the traditional Christmas meal with French soldiers deployed abroad, Emmanuel Macron finally announced at midday that he would spend the night in the French archipelago in the Indian Ocean devastated by Cyclone Chido, in order to go on Friday to areas further from the capital, Mamoudzou. “I will go to the bangas tomorrow morning,” explained the president about these precarious habitats where nearly a third of the population lived before the cyclone and which were largely destroyed. It must also reach areas further inland, specified the Élysée.
According to provisional figures, 31 deaths and some 1,400 injured have been officially recorded, but the authorities fear a much higher toll in France’s poorest department. The prefect therefore launched “a mission to search for the dead”, according to the Ministry of the Interior which emphasizes that “70% of the inhabitants were seriously affected”.
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