Rescue workers scrambled to reach the remote French territory of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean on Monday after the archipelago devastated by Cyclone Chidothe worst storm to hit the region in nearly a century.
While the official death toll was 14, officials in Mayotte said they feared hundreds, if not thousands, of people had been killed by the storm in the densely populated territory, which is home to around 300,000, according to The Associated Press.
French authorities said entire neighborhoods, many of which consisted of built-up slums, had been flattened and public infrastructure, including airports and hospitals, was badly damaged, the AP reported. Damage to the airport’s control tower meant that only military aircraft could land in Mayotte, complicating the rescue response. Electricity has also been reported to have been cut across the archipelago.
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Rescuers, soldiers, medical personnel and supplies have been sent from France, as well as from the nearby French territory of Reunion. Mayotte is considered the poorest territory under the sovereignty of any nation in the European Union, but it still attracts a significant number of economic migrants from nearby nations that are even poorer, largely due to the French state welfare system that is being implemented there.
The French Red Cross told CBS News affiliate BBC News that about 100,000 people live in makeshift slum housing in Mayotte, and that most of them had been completely destroyed by Chido.
The cyclone season in the southwestern Indian Ocean began in early December and Chido hit Mayotte on Saturday as an intense tropical cyclone, the equivalent of a Category 4 hurricane, the BBC reported. It made landfall on the much larger island nation of Madagascar, just south of Mayotte, on Sunday afternoon.
The BBC reported that Chido probably intensified due to climate change. The BBC said that while the number of annual cyclones has not increased in recent decades, more of them have been more intense, probably because warmer air and seawater provide perfect conditions for fueling storms older