Death toll from Tropical Cyclone Freddy rises to 190 in Malawi she stated on Tuesday, according to Reuters, Malawi’s disaster management agency. As recently as Monday, the office reported 99 dead.
According to the authorities, 584 people were injured and 37 are still missing. Rescue work continues, they are also using shovels to search for people stuck in the rubble. A state of disaster was declared in the ten districts most affected by the storm. Meanwhile, the rains continue.
Malawian victims of the element come mainly from around the city of Blantyre, which is the commercial center of the country. Officials at Blantyre’s main teaching hospital said they could not cope with the huge death toll and urged the bereaved to collect bodies for burial as the hospital’s mortuary was running out of space. writes BBC.
“The situation is very desperate. There are many victims, whether injured, missing or dead, and there will be more in the coming days,” Guilherme Botelho, coordinator of emergency projects from the organization Médecins Sans Frontières, Guilherme Botelho, described the situation in Blantyre.
The death toll is expected to rise as some areas remain cut off due to persistent rain and strong winds. “Rivers are overflowing, people are being swept away, buildings are collapsing,” police spokesman Peter Kalaya told the BBC.
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The world has experienced the most war crises and conflicts since the Second World War, she stated UN Under-Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed at the Security Council meeting in January. According to her, even a quarter of the world’s population – two billion people – live in areas affected by violent conflicts.
In Malawi, with a population of 20 million, schools were closed in ten districts on Monday for security reasons, and there were no classes on Tuesday either. Many roads are impassable and electricity supplies have also been disrupted. The state-owned power company said it could not operate the hydroelectric plant because it was covered in debris.
The country is also currently dealing with a cholera epidemic, and the arrival of the storm could make it worse, according to the UN. “Emergency accommodation centers were overcrowded because the number of people affected was higher than expected,” said Luisa Meque, head of Malawi’s disaster management authority.
“We have moved the cholera treatment centers near the hospital to ensure patient safety. The rain has not stopped and there is a lot of damage, which really worries us on many levels. We are really worried about a further increase in cholera cases especially because the supply of vaccines is very poor in Blantyre, but it is too early to assess that,” adds Botelho.
There is still no connection with part of Mozambique
The storm moved into Malawi on Monday night after hitting Mozambique over the weekend. According to the BBC, at least 10 people lost their lives in the neighboring country. However, the exact number is difficult to determine, as there is no power or phone signal in some of the worst-hit parts of the country.
At the weekend, Tropical Storm Freddy hit the region for the second time since the end of February, having previously claimed 28 lives in Mozambique and Madagascar.
Mozambique has had more rainfall in the past four weeks than it usually does in an entire year. Météo-France weather service warned through its center on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean that torrential rains would continue for the next 48 hours, with the cyclone expected to weaken and move offshore on Wednesday.
Freddy is one of the longest-lasting storms known. It formed off the northern coast of Australia in early February, then traveled thousands of kilometers across the southern Indian Ocean, before hitting Mauritius and Réunion, and two weeks later Madagascar and then Mozambique.