Death Toll May Top 1,000 After Cyclone Hammers Mozambique

MAPUTO (Capital Markets in Africa) – A tropical cyclone that tore across Mozambique at the weekend may have killed more than 1,000 people, President Filipe Nyusi said as heavy rains continued to pound neighboring Zimbabwe where flooding left dozens more dead.

“It’s clear that the next few days could be worse,” Nyusi said in comments broadcast on state radio. “If more than 1,000 lives have been lost, we won’t be surprised.”

Mozambique’s worst-recorded flooding occurred in 2000, when Cyclone Leon-Eline struck the southern African nation. About 800 people died that year. The country is the third-most vulnerable on the continent to climate change, according to the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery.

The death toll has risen sharply since Tropical Cyclone Idai made landfall almost directly over the Mozambican port city of Beira on Friday, knocking out communications networks and power plants before moving westward to Zimbabwe. The scale of the damage it caused is “massive and horrifying,” said Jamie LeSueur, who is leading an International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent assessment team in Beira.

“It seems that 90 percent of the area is completely destroyed,” he said in a statement.

Power Imports
Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd., the state-owned power utility in neighboring South Africa, said the storm reduced the amount of electricity it imports from the Mozambique’s Cahora Bassa hydropower dam, exacerbating a shortage that’s resulted in blackouts.

Before forming a tropical cyclone on March 9, the system had already dumped heavy rains over Mozambique and neighboring Malawi earlier this month, displacing more than 100,000 people. The storm then moved back out to the southern Indian Ocean, where warm waters caused it to rapidly strengthen as it once again took aim at Mozambique’s coast.

Coal Exports
The first incarnation of the storm last week resulted in a temporary halt to coal exports from Vale SA’s Moatize operation, Mozambique’s biggest producer, after railway lines were submerged. Operations have since resumed, the company said by email.

In neighboring Zimbabwe, at least 82 people died as Idai swept across the east of the country, a region that’s recently experienced drought. The storm forced President Emmerson Mnangagwa to cut short a visit to the United Arab Emirates to manage the government’s response to the disaster.

Heavy rains are forecast to continue into the middle of the week, bringing more flooding and making it difficult to reach stranded communities in both Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

“We hope that the weather will improve, but right now we only have one helicopter on the ground which is operating in the area due to bad weather,” Joshua Sacco, a Zimbabwean lawmaker for Chimanimani East, one of the worst-affected areas, said by phone. “Unfortunately indications are that the death toll will increase. It’s not looking good at all.”

Source: Bloomberg Business News