March 18 (UPI) — Cyclone Idai has killed more than 150 people in the last few days, officials said Monday, and has destroyed nearly all of Beira, Mozambique’s fourth-largest city.
The storm made landfall four days ago in southeast Africa with winds equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane, forecasters said. The United Nations reported 122 deaths in Mozambique and Malawi and Zimbabwe authorities said the storm caused 65 deaths there, putting the death toll near 200.
Beira bore the brunt of the cyclone, where International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent aid workers described the damage as “massive and horrifying.”
“The situation is terrible,” Jamie LeSueur, who’s leading the Red Cross assessment team in Beira, said in a statement. “The scale of devastation is enormous. It seems that 90 percent of the area is completely destroyed.”
The IFRC said the storm caused major damage to several districts in the eastern part of Mozambique, with Chimanimani and Chipinge districts in Manicaland province reeiving the most damage. Authorities said more than 100 people are missing in Zimbabwe.
“Almost everything is destroyed,” LeSueur added. “Communication lines have been completely cut and roads have been destroyed. Some affected communities are not accessible. Beira has been severely battered.”
LeSueur said a large dam broke over the weekend and buried the last road into the area.
About 1.5 million people in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe have been affected by the storm, U.N. officials said.
“[It] has compounded destructive flooding that has already occurred as far inland as southern Malawi and eastern Zimbabwe,” World Food Program spokesman Hervé Verhoosel told reporters in Geneva.
Mozambique information minister Nick Mangwawa said the army and air force have been deployed for rescue efforts, as have private and public ambulances.
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