Maputo: A tropical cyclone that hit central Mozambique this weekend has displaced thousands of people and caused severe flooding in an area battered by two deadly cyclones in 2019, response teams and aid agencies said. Cyclone Eloise made landfall last week, bringing high-speed winds followed by torrential rain over the port city of Beira, capital of Mozambique's Sofala province, and the adjacent Buzi district.
Almost 7,000 people have been displaced and over 5,000 houses destroyed or damaged in the area, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said. National emergency response teams confirmed six fatalities and 12 serious injuries - numbers expected to rise as the scale of the damage is fully assessed in coming days. "So many places are flooded already and it's getting worse," said Unicef Mozambique spokesman Daniel Timme.
"Rivers are collecting water and bringing it back to the Buzi River basin" south of Beira, he said. Timme said the cyclone had disproportionately affected the city's poorer neighbourhoods, where homes made of tarpaulin and corrugated iron were swept up by winds.
Urgent need of food
Hundreds have taken refuge in a school and were in urgent need of food, medicine and proper shelter, he added. Eloise hit an area devastated by two successive super-storms in March and April 2019. The first, Cyclone Idai, left more than 1,000 dead and caused damage estimated at around $2 billion. Timme said aid workers were scrambling to provide safe drinking water and avoid cholera, which broke out in temporary shelters across Beira around two weeks after Idai hit.
Unicef, the United Nations' children's agency, estimates that 176,000 people have been "severely affected" by Eloise, half of which are children. Around 142,000 hectares of farmland have been swamped, according to preliminary Unicef figures, as well as 26 health centres and 76 classrooms.
