Widespread destruction after 100-year cyclone has hit French territory

Reports of extensive damage are emerging from Mayotte after a 100-year-old cyclone struck the French archipelago on Saturday, wreaking havoc one resident likened to a nuclear bomb, with hundreds and possibly even thousands of feared dead.

“The situation is catastrophic, apocalyptic,” Bruno Garcia, owner of the Hotel Caribou in Mamoudzou, Mayotte’s capital, told CNN affiliate BFMTV.

“We lost everything. The whole hotel is completely destroyed,” Garcia said. “There’s nothing left. It is as if an atomic bomb fell on Mayotte.”

Mayotte is located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa just west of Madagascar. Consisting of two main islands, its land area is about twice the size of Washington DC.

Cyclone Chido, a Category 4 storm, tore through the southwestern Indian Ocean over the weekend, battering northern Madagascar before rapidly strengthening and battering Mayotte with winds of more than 220 kilometers per hour (136 miles per hour), according to France’s weather service. It was the strongest storm to hit the islands in more than 90 years, Meteo-France said.

Chido then continued into northern Mozambique, where it continued to cause damage, although the storm has now weakened.

The cyclone – the worst to hit the territory of just over 300,000 in at least 90 years – flattened neighbourhoods, knocked out power grids, crushed hospitals and schools and damaged the airport’s control tower.

“Honestly, what we are experiencing is a tragedy, you feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war… I saw a whole neighborhood disappear,” Mohamed Ishmael, a resident of Mamoudzou, told Reuters.

At least 14 people have been confirmed dead by the French health minister, but the true death toll is expected to be much higher, with local officials predicting the number of victims could be in the hundreds or even thousands, the Associated Press reported.

“I think there are several hundred dead, maybe we will get close to a thousand. Even thousands … given the violence of this event,” Mayotte prefect François-Xavier Bieuville told Mayotte la 1ère television station.

The worst damage was to the informal settlements and shacks found across Mayotte, Bieuville said.

Of the official death toll, Bieuville said: “This number is not plausible when you see the pictures of the slums.” Aerial footage from France’s military showed villages reduced to rubble.

These neighborhoods are home to many of the roughly 100,000 undocumented migrants living in Mayotte, according to France’s interior ministry.

Mayotte, which is about 5,000 miles from Paris, is the poorest place in the EU and has struggled with unemployment, violence and a worsening migration crisis.

In recent decades, tens of thousands of people from neighboring Comoros and Madagascar have come to Mayotte to seek better economic conditions and access to the French welfare system.

‘Everything has been razed’

The extent of damage from the storm, which destroyed roads and communications networks, and the prevalence of undocumented migrants living in informal housing have hampered search and rescue efforts and made it difficult to determine the true death toll.

About two-thirds of the island is currently inaccessible, Estelle Youssouffa, member of parliament for Mayotte’s first constituency, told BMFTV.

“We must not confuse the villages that are cut off from communication (…) and the veil towns, where there is very little chance of survivors. Everything has been razed, Yousouffa said.

Antoine Piacenza, who works at a middle school in Mamoudzou, told BFMTV that many of his students, who are undocumented, chose not to evacuate ahead of the storm for fear of being caught by the police.

In recent years, France has flooded the island with thousands of police tasked with deporting undocumented migrants and dismantling their settlements.

Desperate family members took to social media to search for news of their loved ones after the storm.

As of Monday morning, Mayotte had been almost completely offline for over 36 hours, according to the website NetBlocks.

“We have no electricity, no water, we have been in darkness for three days. Three days have passed and we have not seen any rescuers,” Fahar, a resident of Mamoudzou, told BFMTV.

France’s minister for daily security, Nicolas Daragon, said late Sunday on social media that the first military planes to provide emergency aid to the cyclone-hit island had landed.

Hundreds of rescuers, firefighters and police have been dispatched to the territory from France and the nearby French territory of Reunion, the Associated Press reported.

Cyclones, also known as typhoons and called hurricanes in North America, are huge heat engines of wind and rain that feed on warm ocean water and moist air. Cyclone season in the southwest Indian Ocean typically runs from mid-November to the end of April, according to France’s weather agency.

Scientists say climate change, driven by human burning of fossil fuels, is making tropical cyclones more destructive, as warmer oceans give them more energy and warmer air can hold more moisture, which is churned up as torrential rain.

In 2019, two powerful cyclones, Idai and Kennethstruck Mozambique over a two-month period, killing hundreds and leaving millions in need of humanitarian assistance.

Chad Youyou, a resident of Hamjago in northern Mayotte, posted videos on Facebook showing flattened trees and extensive damage to his village, the Associated Press reported.

“Mayotte is devastated … we are devastated,” he said.

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