Rescue workers rushed to reach the remote French Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte on Monday after the archipelago was devastated devastated by Cyclone Chidothe worst storm to hit the region in nearly a century.
While the official death toll stood at 14, officials in Mayotte said they feared hundreds if not thousands of people had been killed by the storm in the densely populated area, home to about 300,000 people, according to the Associated Press.
French authorities said entire neighborhoods – many of which consisted of poorly built slum settlements – were leveled and public infrastructure, including airports and hospitals, was badly damaged, the AP reported. Damage to the airport’s control tower meant that only military aircraft could land in Mayotte, complicating rescue efforts. Power outages also reportedly occurred across the archipelago.
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Rescue workers, soldiers, medical personnel and supplies were sent from France and the nearby French territory of Réunion. Mayotte is considered the poorest territory under the sovereignty of a European Union country, but still attracts a significant number of economic migrants from even poorer neighboring countries, largely due to the introduction of the French state welfare system there.
The French Red Cross told CBS News affiliate BBC News that around 100,000 people were living in makeshift slum housing in Mayotte and that most of them had been completely destroyed by Chido.
The cyclone season in the southwest Indian Ocean began in early December, and Chido hit Mayotte on Saturday as a violent tropical cyclone – the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane, the BBC reported. It made landfall late Sunday on the much larger island nation of Madagascar, south of Mayotte.
The BBC reported that Chido was likely made worse by climate change. The BBC said that while the number of annual cyclones has not increased in recent decades, more of them have been more intense, probably because warmer air and seawater provide perfect conditions for larger storms to be triggered.
