Cyclone Idai: After the floods, the famine. And then
THE FLOOD
Overnight, Mozambique’s secondlargest city disappeared. All the lights in Beira went off. Its buildings vanished under six metres of water. Its roads were washed away, its bridges were torn from their foundations, and its people — well, still no one knows how many of its people survived.
They huddled together on the roofs of three-storey buildings as the floodwater lapped at their feet; or, trapped in the branches of the tallest trees, they braced against gale-force winds and waited for a rescue that, for many, never came.
This was no ordinary natural disaster. Mozambique has weathered more than its fair share of floods over the years. Cyclone Idai was more powerful than anything that has come before. It was “a disaster of great proportions”, said President Filipe Nyusi, who flew over Beira in a helicopter and saw bodies floating in water where there used to be villages. More than 90% of the city of 500 000 people was destroyed, said the Red Cross. The United Nations called it “possibly the worst-ever weatherrelated disaster to hit the southern hemisphere”.
What’s left of Beira is now cut off from the rest of Mozambique. Humanitarian agencies are only able to bring in supplies by air or by boat. National Road number 6, the one major road linking the city to the rest of the country, has been destroyed. Beira is now an “island in the ocean”, according to media reports.
Cyclone Idai hit Beira late on March 13, but it did not stop there. It barrelled inland, sweeping the city’s food is stored. A week after Cyclone Idai struck the city, the population is still without adequate food, water and communications.
Vehicles bringing food into the area are attacked by people who do not know where their next meal will come from; they have lost everything. This complicates the humanitarian response. An official from the National Institute of Disaster Management is on the spot, trying to co-ordinate with police on how to bring in a truck containing food aid to another warehouse that has been overrun by people.
The situation in Beira is dramatic. The city is Mozambique’s secondlargest, and is the economic hub of the central regions. Its importance to the regional economy cannot be overstated: it is one of the main ports linking landlocked Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe to the rest of the world. But now everything is broken.
The only bank that is functioning is BCI, but the queues are long. At the ATM next to the Beira municipal council, the queue stretches for two blocks. The minimum wait in line is four to five hours. Some people arrive through Sofala province and then across the border into Zimbabwe’s Chimanimani district. As it moved further from the sea, it weakened, but even then it was strong enough to burst riverbanks, sweep away bridges and flood towns and villages.
Although Malawi was not struck directly, the cyclone caused heavy rains.
So far, according to official tallies, more than 200 people have died in Mozambique, 56 are dead in Malawi and 98 in Zimbabwe. In total, an estimated 2.6-million people could be affected, with hundreds of thousands made homeless. at 9pm and only leaving the next day. When they do leave, they are at the mercy of thieves who surround almost every ATM.
Electronic payments are not operational because the internet and mobile phone networks have collapsed.
All of those numbers are expected to rise as more details emerge over the coming days, especially because the flooding may not be over — the heavy rains mean that some dams, such as Marowanyati Dam in Zimbabwe, are at risk of overflowing.
THE FAMINE
The worst is still to come. Before people even begin to rebuild their lives, they will have to cope with the secondary effects of the cyclone, which are likely to be even more devastating than the cyclone itself.
The most immediate threat is The Movitel network functions — now and again.
The only place in the city that has electricity and internet is the operations centre at Beira’s airport, where the Red Cross has set up a server with free internet for journalists. This is the lack of clean food and water. This is one of the poorest regions in the world, and has one of its most vulnerable populations. It’s an area where people eat what they can grow. Their crops have been drowned, just weeks away from harvest time, and food stores are spoiled. Where will food come from now? And how long will it be before the land recovers sufficiently to plant new crops?
In Zimbabwe, poor rainfall earlier this year meant that, prior to the cyclone, 5.3-million people were already in need of food aid. The government was not sure where that also the mobile phone recharging centre. Rescue helicopters arrive here, co-ordinated by Adrian Nance from a charity called Wings Like Eagles, which is working with Mercy Air.
Nance says that since Sunday they have carried out more than 40 rescue food aid was going to come from. That shortage now risks turning into a famine, similar to the one that followed the floods in Mozambique in 2000.
In a brutal irony, survivors of Cyclone Idai must also be careful about what they drink. Much of the water that surrounds them now will be unfit for human consumption. To make things worse, flooding is likely to have contaminated boreholes too.
In Mozambique alone, the cyclone destroyed at least 30 health centres. Until humanitarian agencies can get to the area in force — assuming they receive the funding necessary to do so — survivors will have no support as they confront the epidemics that inevitably accompany flooding, including cholera and malaria.
THE FUTURE
It is impossible to state definitively that climate change caused Cyclone Idai — that’s just not how science works. But this hasn’t stopped Zimbabwe’s state-run Herald newspaper from proclaiming: “For Doubting Thomases, Tropical Cyclone Idai brings vital lessons that climate change is now with us … the consequences of climate change are inevitable, and we are experiencing them through cyclones like Cyclone Idai.”
Where the science is clear is that a hotter world means more damaging cyclones. Because they draw their energy from the oceans, the hotter the oceans become, the more powerful the cyclones will be. Hotter oceans — and melting ice caps — also mean ocean levels rise. Put together, this means cyclones spin faster, do more damage and have more energy as they batter into the interior. Mozambique is particularly vulnerable because of the already warm