CAPE TOWN – France rushed help by ship and military plane to its poor Indian Ocean overseas territory of Mayotte on Monday after the island was rocked by the worst storm in nearly a century.

Authorities in Mayotte fear hundreds and possibly thousands of people have died from Cyclone Chido, although the official death toll stood at 14 as of Monday morning. Rescue teams and medical personnel were sent to the island off Africa’s east coast from France and other countries, as well as the nearby French territory of Réunion, as well as plenty of supplies.

French television station TF1 reported on Monday morning that Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau had arrived in Mamoudzou, the capital of Mayotte.

“It will take days and days to count the number of people,” he told French media.

French authorities said more than 800 more emergency personnel were expected to arrive in the coming days as rescuers comb through the devastation caused by Chido on Saturday in the densely populated archipelago of around 300,000 people.

Mayotte Prefect François-Xavier Bieuville, the top French government official in Mayotte, told local TV station Mayotte la 1ere on Sunday that the death toll was several hundred people and could even be in the thousands.

He said Mayotte’s poor slums of metal smelters and other informal structures had suffered terrible damage and authorities had struggled to establish an accurate number of dead and injured after the worst cyclone to hit Mayotte since the 1930s.

Entire neighborhoods were leveled, public infrastructure such as the main airport and the hospital were severely damaged and power supplies were interrupted, French authorities said. Damage to the airport’s control tower means only military aircraft can fly to Mayotte, complicating the response.

Mayotte is France’s poorest department and considered the poorest territory in the European Union, but due to better living standards and France’s welfare system, it is a destination for economic migration from even poorer countries such as the nearby Comoros and even Somalia.

Bieuville, the prefect of Mayotte, said it would be extremely difficult to count all the dead and many may never be recorded, partly because of the Muslim tradition of burying people within 24 hours of their death, and also due to the many undocumented migrants living on the island.

Chido swept through the southwest Indian Ocean on Friday and Saturday, also hitting the nearby islands of Comoros and Madagascar. However, Mayotte was directly in the path of the cyclone and suffered the brunt. According to the French weather service, Chido brought winds of more than 220 km/h (136 miles per hour), making it a Category 4 cyclone, the second strongest on the scale.

It made landfall late Sunday in Mozambique on the African mainland, where authorities and aid groups said it could affect more than two million people in another poor country where health facilities are already limited. Mozambican media reported that three people died in the north of the country where the cyclone made landfall, but said this was very early damage.

Further inland, Malawi and Zimbabwe have also made preparations for possible evacuations due to flooding, while Chido continues its easterly trajectory, although the cyclone has weakened as it moves overland.

December to March is cyclone season in the southwest Indian Ocean, and southern Africa has been hit by a number of strong cyclones in recent years. Cyclone Idai killed more than 1,300 people in 2019, mostly in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Cyclone Freddy killed more than 1,000 people in several countries in the Indian Ocean and southern Africa last year.

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AP Africa News: https://apnews.com/hub/africa