The death toll after a powerful cyclone in Mozambique has risen to 446 from 417, Mozambican Minister of Land and Environment Celso Correia said yesterday, adding that 531,000 people had been affected by the disaster.
Cyclone Idai lashed the Mozambican port city of Beira with winds of up to 170kph, then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings and causing massive flooding.
Beneath the crumbling arcade of the municipal council building in Beira, a group of families has set up a dismal camp. They sleep on dirty concrete pavement and cook with branches from the trees brought down by Idai.
Photo: AP
Correia said that the situation in the country was now critical.
Laila Jorge, a mother of three, was one of those caught by the storm. A street vendor of alcoholic drinks, she was living in Zona B, a poor area of the port city of Beira, where shacks were once located close to the sea.
“When the wind came, it took off the roof and blew down the wooden walls of my house,” Jorge said. “We had to run because we thought that we were going to die. There was waist-deep water [from the storm surge] in the street, so we ran here. We didn’t have our shoes and our feet got cut from glass we couldn’t see. We stopped when we got here because it was dry and because it was empty.”
They have lost everything, she said.
Her pots and shoes were donated by workers cleaning up the damage. Apart from that, they have received no aid.
Near Jorge, several children gathered water in large plastic bottles from a deep puddle that overflowed from the fountain pool in the square opposite. Next to them, a boy of about eight is washing tiny sprat-like fish that glisten in a pot.
Jorge said the fish were washed up by the cyclone and stranded in the pools of standing water left in the city and were now being collected by local boys.
“Dead or alive, we’ve been eating them, because it’s all we have to eat,” she said.
Jorge said dirty water being scooped up and carried by the children from the square was for cooking and washing, not drinking, but added that her children aged three, five and seven all had diarrhea.
Despite a huge global-aid appeal that has raised tens of millions across the world, including in the UK, many like Jorge have yet to see assistance.
International aid officials have said they were initially blindsided by the nature of the catastrophe.
They had focused their initial efforts on Beira, which the Red Cross initially thought was largely destroyed by the cyclone. They did not foresee the arrival of devastating floods that would hit huge areas of the countryside more than a day later.
That wrongfooting had consequences. Badly needed helicopters, required to rescue people in the countryside sheltering in trees, on roofs and in electric pylons, were slow to arrive.
“We could see from our first aerial surveys that Beira had been badly hit,” Jamie LeSueur of the Red Cross told reporters. “What we weren’t able to predict was the scale of the flooding that would follow.”
And the biggest impact might be the least visible in one of Mozambique’s most densely populated regions. After several years of drought in southern Africa, the subsistence farmers who populate the coastal plains have lost their crops at harvest time. They have no food or produce to take to market.
This weekend emergency efforts were shifting from search and rescue — led by the pilots and boat operators who have plucked people from the floods — to humanitarian assistance. Within the next few days a road route is to reopen to Beira, ending the bottleneck on food supplies.
As the waters have started to recede, the number of those wanting to be evacuated by boat has begun to dwindle, with many preferring to stay put or relocate to the expanding dry areas closer to their homes.
“We hailed people from our boats, but most of those we saw wanted to stay where they were,” an Indian naval officer involved in the rescue effort said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Saturday said it would have to wait until the floodwaters recede until it knew the full expanse of the toll on the people of Mozambique, while the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned that cases of cholera have now been reported in Beira.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was