The delegate of the French Government in the department of MayotteFrançois-Xavier Bieuville, estimated that Cyclone Chido has caused “undoubtedly several hundred dead” in the French archipelago of the same name, located in the Indian Ocean, and has warned that it will take time to establish a final balance.
“It will be very difficult to establish the final balance, but I believe that there will undoubtedly be several hundred (of deaths), perhaps we will get closer to a thousand, even to several thousand“Bieuville said in an interview with the public channel Mayotte la 1er.
“I fear there is deaths that we will not even be able to count officially because Muslim tradition (majority religion in Mayotte) establishes that people have to be buried within 24 hours” after their death, he noted.
In addition to this difficulty in carrying out the count, we must also take into account that, according to the French Ministry of the Interior, approximately 100,000 inhabitants without documentation some that are added to some 320,000 that appear in the official census, hence Bieuville has come to estimate that the dead, in the worst possible scenario, could reach “thousands.”
The French president, Emmanuel Macronhas promised to “act” and has conveyed his regret to those who “have suffered, during these last hours, the most terrible thing, some having lost everything, even their own lives.”
Hours before, the Departmental Operational Center of Mayotte detailed in a first assessment that the slum areas have been completely “destroyed” after the devastating passage of Chido. “There is nothing left”they have indicated.
Images of the passage of Cyclone Chido show the picture of total destruction in the archipelago: demolished houses, roofs and trees torn off, electric poles on the ground…
The Mayotte islands, which have 320,000 inhabitants and are located north of Madagascar, 8,000 kilometers from Paris, have been devastated this Saturday by the winds of a cyclone that reached gusts of 220 kilometers per hour, according to Météo-France.
This department, considered the poorest in Francealso has at least 100,000 precarious homesmost of them destroyed on Saturday. “Many of us have lost everything,” lamented the delegate of this French department, François-Xavier Bieuville, who described Chido as “the most violent and destructive cyclone that we have lived since 1934″.
Mamoudzou International Airport remains closed for commercial flights and much of the roads, too. Nails 100,000 people are without water or electricityand the material damage, according to the Minister of Overseas, François-Noël Buffet, could amount to “billions of euros”, as he estimated to the newspaper Le Monde.
The mayor of the capital of Mayotte, Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, explained to the BFMTV network that the situation is an absolute catastrophe that has affected the marginalized communities of the archipelago. “It is an extremely difficult situation that we have never experienced before,” Soumaila confessed before estimating that the cyclone could have perfectly left “hundreds of thousands of victims” counting dead, injured and affected.
The French Government has indicated that it plans to send, in different waves, up to 800 police and civil rescue personnel while a military transport plane containing humanitarian aid and medical personnel has already landed in the capital Mamoudzou.
One of the fears of Paris are the looting in shops and homes in an already impoverished department that deals with high rates of immigration, in many cases irregular, from the neighboring archipelago of the Comoros and other nations in southeastern Africa.