Hundreds, possibly thousands, may have lost their lives due to Cyclone Chido in the French archipelago of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, a senior French official said on Sunday.
“I think there will certainly be hundreds, maybe even thousands, several thousands,” said Prefect François-Xavier Bieuville during an interview on Mayotte’s local television channel, Mayotte La 1ere.
When asked about the number of victims, the French Ministry of the Interior stated that “it will be difficult to identify all the victims” and that an exact number could not be determined at this stage.
Cyclone Chido struck Mayotte overnight, according to the official meteorological administration Meteo-France, with winds exceeding 200 kilometers per hour that damaged shelters, government buildings, and a hospital. According to Meteo-France, this was the most powerful storm to hit the island in over 90 years.
Aerial footage taken by the French gendarmerie showed the wreckage of hundreds of shelters on the hills of one of the Mayotte islands, where there has been a concentration of illegal migrants from neighboring Comoros.
It has been difficult to assess the number of victims after the cyclone, which also raised concerns about access to food, drinking water, and hygiene, authorities said.
“The situation will be complicated for the number of victims because Mayotte is a Muslim territory where the dead are buried within 24 hours,” a Ministry of the Interior official said earlier. According to the ministry, there are over 100,000 undocumented migrants in Mayotte.
It takes four days of travel by boat to reach Mayotte, which is nearly 8,000 kilometers away from Paris. Mayotte is poorer than the rest of France and has been facing violence from gangs and social unrest for decades.
Around 77% of Mayotte’s population lives below the poverty line.
Tensions had already increased earlier this year due to a shortage of drinking water.
The cyclone moved on Sunday towards northern Mozambique, where the full extent of the damage was still unclear. According to an announcement from the internet monitoring network NetBlocks, heavy rains and winds had damaged power supplies and telecommunications infrastructure.
