‘It’s as if an atomic bomb fell on Mayotte’: Destruction after 100-year cyclone pummels French territory

(CNN) — Reports of widespread damage are emerging from Mayotte after a 100-year cyclone ripped across the French archipelago Saturday, inflicting devastation that one resident likened to an atomic bomb, with hundreds and possibly even thousands of feared victims.

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

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

Mayotte lies in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, just west of Madagascar. Made up 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, impacting northern Madagascar before rapidly intensifying and slamming Mayotte with winds above 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, though the storm has now weakened.

The cyclone – the worst to hit the territory of just over 300,000 in at least 90 years – flattened neighborhoods, knocked out electrical 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 an entire neighborhood disappear,” Mohamed Ishmael, a Mamoudzou resident, 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 some several hundred dead, maybe we’ll get close to a thousand. Even thousands … given the violence of this event,″ Mayotte Prefect François-Xavier Bieuville told TV station Mayotte la 1ère.

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

Of the official death toll, Bieuville said: “This figure is not plausible when you see the images 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 who live in Mayotte, according to France’s interior ministry.

Located about 5,000 miles from Paris, Mayotte is the poorest place in the European Union and has struggled with unemployment, violence and a deepening migration crisis.

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

‘Everything has been razed’

The extent of the damage from the storm, which wrecked roads and communications networks, and the prevalence of undocumented migrants living in informal dwellings have hindered search and rescue efforts and made it difficult to ascertain the true death toll.

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

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

Antoine Piacenza, who works in a middle school in Mamoudzou, told BFMTV that many of his students, who are undocumented, chose not to evacuate ahead of the storm out of 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 entirely offline for over 36 hours, according to the website NetBlocks.

“We have no electricity, no water, we’ve been in the dark for three days. It’s been three days and we haven’t seen any rescuers,” Fahar, a Mamoudzou resident, told BFMTV.

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

Hundreds of rescuers, firefighters and police have been sent 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 enormous 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 humans burning fossil fuels, is making tropical cyclones more destructive as hotter oceans fuel them with more energy and warmer air can hold more moisture, which is wrung out in the form of torrential rain.

In 2019, two powerful cyclones, Idai and Kenneth, pummeled Mozambique over a period of two months, killing hundreds and leaving millions in need of humanitarian assistance.

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

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

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