Race against time to rescue the inhabitants of Mayotte

A race against time is underway in Mayotte to help the victims of this French archipelago in the Indian Ocean devastated by a deadly cyclone, where water and food are lacking, and to try to find survivors in the rubble of the shanty towns .

The resigning Ministers of the Interior and Overseas Territories Bruno Retailleau and François-Noël Buffet, as well as their Mahorais colleague Thani Mohamed-Soilihi are expected Monday around noon (10:00 a.m. in Paris) in the poorest department in France, where the authorities fear “several hundred” deaths, perhaps even “a few thousand”.

A final assessment will be “very difficult” to establish because the Muslim tradition, very anchored in Mayotte, requires that the deceased be buried “within 24 hours”, explained the prefect François-Xavier Bieuville on Sunday evening.

In addition, the illegal population of the territory exceeds 100,000 people according to the Ministry of the Interior – out of some 320,000 inhabitants officially counted -, making an exhaustive count of the dead improbable.

Emmanuel Macron will chair a meeting at the interministerial crisis center of the Ministry of the Interior on Monday at 6 p.m., the Élysée said.

With wind gusts of more than 220 km/h, Cyclone Chido – the most intense that Mayotte has experienced in 90 years – ravaged the small archipelago on Saturday where around a third of the population lives in precarious housing, totally destroyed.

Huts destroyed, tin roofs blown away, electric poles down, trees uprooted… The residents, who remained confined during the passage of the cyclone, discovered, stunned, scenes of chaos. Across the territory, many roads are impassable and many communications cut.

“It’s carnage. The court, the prefecture, many services, shops, schools are on the ground,” Ousseni Balahachi, a retired nurse, told AFP from Mamoudzou, the Mahorese “capital”. The hospital was flooded and, according to him, risks not being able to treat the many injured in good conditions.

The situation of the health care system in Mayotte is “very degraded with a very damaged hospital and medical centers which are also inoperable,” confirmed the Minister of Health, Geneviève Darrieussecq, on Monday.

The control tower at Mayotte-Dzaoudzi airport suffered significant damage, and the resumption of commercial flights is not envisaged for “at best ten days”, a prefectural source told AFP on Monday.

An air and sea bridge is deployed from the island of Reunion, a French territory 1,400 km away as the crow flies, to send medical and relief equipment and personnel. A total of 800 civil security personnel are sent as reinforcements, with a field hospital and satellite transmission equipment.

Rescuers expect to find many victims in the rubble of the densely populated shanty towns, particularly in the heights of Mamoudzou, said the city’s mayor Ambdilwahedou Soumaila.

Many undocumented immigrants from the slums had not joined the shelters provided by the prefecture, “thinking that it would be a trap being set for them (…) to pick them up and take them outside the borders”, according to former nurse Ousseni Balahachi.

Many victims reached accommodation centers on Sunday, reported Salama Ramia, senator from Mayotte. “But unfortunately there is no water, no electricity, hunger is starting to rise. It is urgent that help arrives, especially when you see children, babies, to whom we have nothing concrete to offer,” the elected official expressed alarm on BFMTV.

“Some of my neighbors are already hungry and thirsty,” also laments Lucas Duchaufour, a physiotherapist living in Labattoir, a town on the island of Petite-Terre.

Residents speak of a climate of insecurity, with scenes of looting in the Kawéni industrial zone in Mamoudzou, as Frédéric Bélanger, 52, reported to AFP.

“We are afraid of being attacked, of being looted,” confided Océane, a nurse at the Mayotte hospital center on BFMTV. Some 1,600 police officers and gendarmes are mobilized on the ground in particular to “avoid looting”, indicated the prefect.

Visiting Corsica on Sunday, Pope Francis said he supported “in spirit” the victims of this “tragedy”. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, assured that the EU was ready to help France “in the days to come”.