More than two days after the devastating and deadly passage of Cyclone Chido, emergency services are organizing to find survivors in the rubble in Mayotte, a battered archipelago where the first evacuations took place on Monday and where Emmanuel Macron, who will decree “a national mourning”will surrender “in the coming days.”
“It’s about facing emergencies and starting to prepare for the future,” the president said on X after a government crisis meeting. “Faced with this tragedy which upsets each of us, I will declare national mourning”he added.
A “search mission for the dead”
Authorities carried out Monday evening “First 25 evacuations” of patients to Reunion, announced the resigning Minister of Health Geneviève Darrieussecq to AFP. For now, the official death toll stands at 21 hospital deaths and the local prefect set up a “mission to search for the dead”. But the authorities fear “several hundred” dead, maybe even “a few thousand” in this poorest territory and department in France.
“The island is completely devastated. The precarious housing, the shanty towns, nothing remains“declared Monday evening the resigning Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau, returning to Reunion after a visit “to the heart of the disaster” in Mayotte, alongside his Overseas colleague François-Noël Buffet.
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