The death toll from Cyclone Chido has continued to rise, with authorities confirming that 45 people were killed in Mozambique and 13 in Malawi.
French officials said the number of deaths on the Mayotte archipelago remained unclear, having previously expressed fears that hundreds, possibly thousands, of people were killed in slums flattened by the storm. So far, 22 deaths and 1,500 injuries, 200 of them critical, have been confirmed.
The acting interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, told the French station BFMTV on Wednesday: “I cannot give a death toll because I don’t know. I fear the toll will be too heavy.”
The cyclone, which meteorologists said was intensified by climate breakdown, struck Mayotte with winds of up to 140mph (225km/h) on Saturday. It then barrelled across northern Mozambique, where there is an Islamist insurgency, and Malawi.
Nearly 500 people were injured in Mozambique, according to the National Institute of Risk and Disaster Management, and 24,000 homes were destroyed.
Southern Africa was already reeling from a drought this year that had left millions of people battling hunger.
In Mayotte, a French overseas region between Madagascar and Mozambique, the water system was “working at 50%” but there was a risk of “poor quality”, France’s minister for overseas matters, François-Noël Buffet, told radio station Europe 1.
French authorities said on Wednesday that they had started to distribute 23 tons of water. A field hospital should be working by next week, Buffet said, after the territory’s hospital was put out of action by the cyclone.
Mayotte, the poorest part of France, has an official population of 320,000. But there are as many as 200,000 more undocumented migrants, most from the nearby island of Comoros, living in tightly packed tin-roofed shacks.
The anti-immigrant Retailleau also used his BFMTV appearance to criticise Comoros, saying Mayotte could not be rebuilt without addressing migration.
after newsletter promotion
The French president is due to travel to Mayotte on Thursday, with plans to visit a hospital and a destroyed neighbourhood, his office said. “Our compatriots are living through the worst just a few thousand kilometres away,” Emmanuel Macron said.
Some Mahorais expressed anger that Retailleau had not gone to damaged areas when he visited on Monday, including Zaïna Assani, 58, in a call to her daughter from Pamanzi, on Mayotte’s second island, Petite-Terre. “I want to scream,” she said.
Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
