Reuters
Women queue for food in a camp for people
displaced in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai in Beira, Mozambique, March
26, 2019. REUTERS/Mike Hutchings
For two days before Cyclone Idai hit, a government official drove down
the bumpy roads of Buzi in central Mozambique, warning people through a
megaphone that a big storm was coming.
He told them to find a place to shelter, but many people in the once bustling estuary town did not know where to go.
Among them were 21-year-old Gaspar Armando and his extended family of
15. When the cyclone ripped though Buzi on March 14, they stayed in
their four homes made of sticks,
mud until the storm tore off the
sheet-metal roofs, and the walls collapsed.
Around midnight, with the rain horizontal, the family ran to a small
concrete slaughterhouse nearby. They have lived there ever since,
climbing onto the blue steel roof when the floods came.
SEE ALSO :Cyclone, famine signs of bad things to come
“The government knew it was going to be bad but they didn’t find us a safe place. They didn’t organise it,” Armando said.
Such scenes played out in many other towns and villages, survivors said.
Government and humanitarian officials said they did not anticipate the
extent of flooding in one of the most severe storms to hit Africa’s east
coast in more than a decade.
An early warning system implemented by the government did not reach
everyone and in the poorest, most remote areas there are few solid
structures where people can shelter, aid workers and residents said.
The death toll had reached 468 in Mozambique by Tuesday and hundreds of
thousands of others were in need of food, water, and shelter, according
to the United Nations.
NO PLACE TO GO
Many people are angry that the government did not do more to protect
them. Reuters’ interviews with 18 people in four communities spread
across 100 kilometres (62 miles) showed the warning systems proved
insufficient.
Four of those interviewed said they had received no warning about the
impending storm. The others said they were warned but were offered no
help moving to a safer place.
Makeshift camps were set up on higher ground only after the flooding,
they said, so many people decided to see out the storm in their homes.
“We thought it would just be a little rain,” said Louisa Ndega, 60, sheltering at a camp in the village of Guara Guara.
Mozambique’s land and environment minister, Celso Correia, who is
leading the government’s response to the disaster, told Reuters it was
not clear until the final days before the storm where it would hit.
The area under threat was too vast and, with about 7 million inhabitants, too heavily populated to be evacuated, he said.
Mozambique was also hit by deadly floods and cyclones in 2000 and 2007,
and since then has beefed up its response team and implemented an
early-warning system.
The system was triggered weeks before Cyclone Idai, with red flags raised to alert people to the dangers, Correia said.
He said people had been told to seek higher ground when they saw the
flags flying, but that no one could have predicted the force and speed
of the flooding when two big rivers burst their banks following the
cyclone.
The area around the coastal town of Beira, where the cyclone made
landfall, started flooding within 36 hours of the storm and was soon
unrecognisable, with brown water covering the land.
“These floods were extreme,” Correia said. “It was almost instantaneous.”
Philippe Caroff, a forecaster at the regional cyclone centre on the
French island of La Reunion, said his agency’s forecasts were showing a
“high level of threat” for the region almost three days before the
cyclone made landfall, including storm surges of nearly four metres (13
ft) around Beira.
“It was not difficult to imagine that flooding would become a problem because the area is very flat,” he said.
There had also been a significant amount of rain in the preceding months, the wet season in Mozambique, he said.
The country’s national weather service receives updates from the centre,
and cyclone bulletins are available on its website, Caroff said.
EARLY WARNINGS
He said he had sent an email to the chief forecaster at the Mozambique
weather service when the risk of a worst-case scenario became apparent.
In it, he said, he expressed hope that all preparations had been made
for Beira’s coastal frontline.
Mozambique’s weather service could not immediately be reached by phone and did not respond to an email seeking comment.
The United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,
which is overseeing the international relief effort, declined comment
on the government’s preparations.
From Mozambique, Cyclone Idai tore inland into Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings and causing deadly mudslides.
At least 179 people were killed in Zimbabwe, where the Department of
Civil Protection had sent text messages and issued radio and television
warnings advising people to move away from areas in the cyclone’s path
two days before it hit.
But in Zimbabwe’s worst affected district, Chimanimani, many said they
had no place to go because the government had not provided shelter, and
there was no mandatory evacuation order.
In Malawi, the death toll stood at 60.
Scientists believe climate change will make cyclones like Idai more
frequent, making it vital that systems are in place to protect the most
vulnerable, according to humanitarian agencies.
“There are definitely lessons to be learned,” said Pierluigi Testa, an
emergency coordinator for the international aid group Médecins Sans
Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
Testa said a network of purpose-built, reinforced-concrete storm
shelters similar to ones used in Bangladesh could have offered
protection against the cyclone.
Correia said there was no time to set up such facilities in Mozambique.
About 300,000 people had moved to higher ground though even some of
these places ended up under water, he said.
“I FELT LIKE WE WERE GOING TO DIE”
No one interviewed by Reuters moved in anticipation of the storm. Some sought refuge in sturdy buildings such as schools.
At a hospital south of Beira, Catarina Meque, 21, said the water was already rising when she received the flood warning.
Medical staff started shouting to people to climb onto beds but hospital
workers fled as the water got higher, and Meque said she followed with
her malnourished six-month-old baby.
“I felt like we were going to die if we waited there,” she said in Guara
Guara, which she reached after walking for 17 hours through waist-high
water.
About 100 km northwest of Beira, in the devastated village of John Segredo, villagers said they received no warning at all.
Many people remain fearful. In Buzi, a mother holding a young child asked: “The water — it’s not coming back, is it?”
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