The delegate of the French Government in the department of Mayotte, François-Xavier Bieuville, estimated that Cyclone Chido has caused “undoubtedly several hundred deaths” in the French archipelago of the same name, located in the Indian Ocean, and has warned that it will take time to establish a final balance.
“It will be very difficult to establish the final balance, but I believe that there will undoubtedly be several hundred (deaths), perhaps we will get close to a thousand, even several thousand,” said Bieuville, in an interview with the public channel. Mayotte the 1st cited by the EFE agency.
“I fear that there will be deaths that we will not even be able to officially count because Muslim tradition (majority religion in Mayotte) establishes that people have to be buried within 24 hours” after their death, he noted.
The islands, which have 320,000 inhabitants and are 8,000 kilometers from Paris, near the island of Madagascar, were devastated on Saturday by the winds of Cyclone ‘Chido’, which reached gusts of 220 kilometers per hour. In a first official balance made public this morning, there was a total of 14 deaths.
“The slums are now mass graves, since they have been wiped off the map,” warned MP (LIOT) Estelle Youssouffa this Sunday afternoon on French television BFMTV.
This department, considered the poorest in France, also has at least 100,000 precarious homes, most of them destroyed on Saturday. Already on Saturday afternoon, the outgoing French Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, warned that it will “without a doubt take days” to “refine” the number of victims and “we fear it will be high.”
According to the French economic media Les Echós, Minister Bruno Retailleau will travel to the archipelago on Monday with his counterpart responsible for the Overseas Territories, François-Noël Buffet.
Mamoudzou International Airport is closed to commercial flights and much of the roads are closed. In addition, there are testimonies of lack of electricity and drinking water. According to France’s outgoing Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, more than 15,000 homes are without electricity.
The French Government has already announced that it will send, in different waves, up to 800 police and civil rescue personnel while a military transport plane containing humanitarian aid has already landed in the capital Mamoudzou. One of the fears of Paris is looting of shops and homes.
Source: www.eldiario.es
