Reports of widespread damage are emerging from Mayotte after a 100-year cyclone ripped through the French archipelago on Saturday, wreaking havoc that one resident likened to an atomic bomb, with hundreds, possibly thousands, of feared victims.

“The situation is catastrophic and apocalyptic,” Bruno Garcia, owner of the Hotel Caribou in Mamoudzou, the capital of Mayotte, told CNN affiliate BFMTV.

“We lost everything. “The entire hotel is completely destroyed,” Garcia said. “There is nothing left. It’s as if an atomic bomb had fallen on Mayotte.”

Mayotte is located in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa, west of Madagascar. The land area consists of two main islands and is approximately twice the size of Washington DC.

Cyclone Chido, a Category 4 storm, raged across the southwestern Indian Ocean over the weekend, hitting northern Madagascar before quickly intensifying and hitting Mayotte with winds of over 220 kilometers per hour (136 miles per hour), according to the French weather service announced. It was the strongest storm to hit the islands in more than 90 years, Meteo-France said.

Chido then moved further into northern Mozambique, where it continued to cause damage, although the storm has now weakened.

The cyclone – the worst to hit the area of ​​just over 300,000 people in at least 90 years – leveled neighborhoods, knocked out power grids, destroyed hospitals and schools and damaged the airport control tower.

“Honestly, what we are experiencing is a tragedy, you feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war… I saw a whole neighborhood disappear,” Mohamed Ishmael, a resident of Mamoudzou, told Reuters.

At least 14 people have been confirmed dead by France’s health minister, but the actual death toll is expected to be much higher, with local officials predicting the toll could be in the hundreds or even thousands, the Associated Press reported.

“I think there are a few hundred dead, maybe we’ll get closer to a thousand. Even thousands… given the violence of this event,” the prefect of Mayotte, François-Xavier Bieuville, told Mayotte la 1ère television.

The worst damage was to informal settlements and shacks across Mayotte, Bieuville said.

Regarding the official death toll, Bieuville said: “This number is not plausible when you see the pictures of the slums.” Aerial photos taken by the French military showed villages reduced to rubble.

According to the French Interior Ministry, many of the approximately 100,000 illegal migrants living in Mayotte live in these neighborhoods.

Located about 5,000 miles from Paris, Mayotte is the poorest place in the European Union. He is struggling with unemployment, violence and a worsening migration crisis.

In recent decades, tens of thousands of people from neighboring Comoros and Madagascar have come to Mayotte seeking better economic conditions and access to the French welfare system.

“Everything was razed to the ground”

The extent of damage caused by the storm, which destroyed roads and communications networks, and the high prevalence of illegal migrants living in informal shelters have hampered search and rescue efforts and made it difficult to determine the true death toll.

About two-thirds of the island is currently inaccessible, Estelle Youssouffa, MP for Mayotte’s first constituency, told BMFTV.

“We must not confuse the villages that are cut off from communications with the slums where the chances of survival are very low. Everything was razed to the ground,” Yousouffa said.

Antoine Piacenza, who works at a middle school in Mamoudzou, told BFMTV that many of his students, who are undocumented, decided not to evacuate before the storm for fear of being caught by police.

In recent years, France has flooded the island with thousands of police officers tasked with deporting illegal migrants and dismantling their settlements.

Desperate family members took to social media to search for news about their loved ones in the wake of the storm.

According to the website NetBlocks, Mayotte had been almost completely offline for over 36 hours as of Monday morning.

“We have no electricity, no water, we have been in the dark for three days. It has been three days and we have not seen any rescuers,” Fahar, a resident of Mamoudzou, told BFMTV.

France’s daily security minister Nicolas Daragon said on social media late Sunday that the first military aircraft providing emergency aid to the cyclone-hit island had landed.

Hundreds of rescuers, firefighters and police were dispatched to the area from France and the nearby French territory of Reunion, the Associated Press reported.

Cyclones, also called typhoons and hurricanes in North America, are enormous heat engines of wind and rain that feed on warm seawater and moist air. According to the French meteorological agency, the cyclone season in the southwest Indian Ocean usually lasts from mid-November to the end of April.

Scientists say climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels is making tropical cyclones more destructive because hotter oceans provide them with more energy and warmer air can hold more moisture, which is wrung out in the form of torrential rain.

In 2019, two powerful cyclones, Idai and Kenneth, devastated Mozambique over a two-month period, killing hundreds and leaving millions in need of humanitarian assistance.

Chad Youyou, a resident of Hamjago in northern Mayotte, posted videos on Facebook showing fallen trees and extensive damage in his village, the Associated Press reported.

“Mayotte is destroyed… we are destroyed,” he said.

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