Super Cyclone Yasa flattened entire villages as it tore through Fiji, aid agencies said yesterday, with a baby among two confirmed deaths and rescue workers racing to the worst-hit communities.
Yasa made landfall on the Pacific island nation late on Thursday as a top-of-the-scale Category 5 storm, lashing Fiji’s second-largest island, Vanua Levu.
The storm triggered floods, landslides and blackouts before moving out to sea early yesterday, where it rapidly weakened to a Category 3 system.
Photo: Fiji Roads Authority via Reuters
Zalim Hussein of Savusavu, a small town of a few thousand people on Vanua Levu, said that he feared for his life sheltering at home in the dark as screeching winds ripped apart houses around him.
“I could hear roofs of neighboring houses flying, trees falling and branches breaking outside and big waves crushing on the shore,” he said. “We were all scared for our lives and I thought at one point we’d lose our home. In my 65 years, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said that two deaths had been confirmed, a 45-year-old man and a three-month-old baby.
“We sadly expect fatalities to rise,” he said.
Most dwellings in rural Fiji are made from timber and corrugated iron sheeting, and are not made to withstand winds like those unleashed by Yasa, which had been forecast to bring gusts of up to 345kph.
“There are quite a few villages that are reporting that all homes have been destroyed,” Save the Children Fiji CEO Shairana Ali said. “Most of these people rely on farming for their livelihood and their crops have been destroyed as well.”
The Red Cross said that it was scrambling response teams amid “extensive destruction” in Vanua Levu’s Bua region and coastal communities inundated by storm surges.
Aid agencies had prepositioned supplies across the country in anticipation of major disasters during cyclone season, which runs until May.
There were about 24,000 people sheltering in almost 500 evacuation centers across the country, Bainimarama said.
Authorities had issued dire warnings about the danger posed by the cyclone for most of the week, urging people to find solid structures or flee to higher ground if living on the coast.
A state of natural disaster was on Thursday declared, giving emergency services sweeping powers to impose curfews and movement restrictions for the next 30 days.
Yasa is the third Category 5 storm to hit Fiji since 2016, when Cyclone Winston killed 44 people and destroyed tens of thousands of homes.
The most recent was Cyclone Harold, which claimed 31 lives as it tracked through the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga in April this year.
The human cost of Yasa could have been worse had it not landed in the sparsely populated Bau province, causing no major damage to large towns, except for flooding in Rakiraki on the main island of Viti Levu.
Bainimarama, a long-time campaigner for climate action, blamed global warming for the monster storms, which were once rare, but have become relatively common.
“This is not normal. This is a climate emergency,” Bainimarama wrote on Twitter.
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