Thousands of people have been displaced following the tropical Cyclone Eloise which hit central Mozambique over the weekend. The cyclone also caused severe flooding in an area battered by two deadly cyclones in 2019, response teams and aid agencies said.
In the early hours of Saturday, Cyclone Eloise made landfall bringing high-speed winds which were followed by torrential rain over the port city of Beira, capital of Mozambique’s Sofala province, as well as the adjacent Buzi district.
On Monday, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said nearly 7,000 people have been displaced and over 5,000 houses destroyed or damaged in the area, citing preliminary government figures.
On Sunday, six fatalities and 12 serious injuries were confirmed by National emergency response teams, with numbers expected to rise as the scale of the damage is fully assessed in coming days.
While speaking to journalists, Unicef Mozambique spokesman Daniel Timme said “So many places are flooded already and it’s getting worse.”
“Rivers are collecting water and bringing it back to the Buzi River basin” south of Beira, he said.
The city’s poorer neighbourhoods have been disproportionately affected by the cyclone, as homes made of tarpaulin and corrugated iron were swept up by winds, Timme said.
He added that hundreds of people are now in urgent need of food, medicine and proper shelter, and have now taken refuge in a school.
The area where Cyclone Eloise hit had in March and April 2019, been previously devastated by two successive super-storms.
Cyclone Idai, left more than 1,000 dead and caused damage estimated at around $2 billion (1.6 billion euros), was the first to hit the region.
Timme said aid workers were sworking round the clock to provide safe drinking water and avoid cholera, which broke out in temporary shelters across Beira around two weeks after Idai hit.
According to a report by Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s agency, an estimated that 176,000 people have been “severely affected” by Cyclone Eloise, half of which are children.
Since its Mozambique landfall, Eloise has weakened into an overland depression and moved south towards South Africa.