IRIN
Southern Africa - Floods
6 April 2000


JOHANNESBURG, 6 April (IRIN) - As cyclone Hudha was poised to hit
Mozambique, a senior UN official told IRIN the devastation it had wrought
in Madagascar this week was the worst he had ever seen.

On Thursday the South African Weather Bureau said in a statement that the
cyclone had "slowed down and intensified overnight." It said that the
storm was currently situated about 250 km off the northern Mozambican
coast.

The UN is preparing to launch a fresh appeal for emergency relief in
Madagascar.


MADAGASCAR

Destruction in northeast "dramatic"

In one of the first eye-witness accounts by a senior humanitarian
official, Dr Sergio Soro, the UNICEF Representative in Madagascar, told
IRIN on Thursday that cyclone Hudah had wrought "devastating and dramatic
damage" in northeast Madagascar this week. The cyclone which swept through
the northeast part of the island on Sunday was "one of the most powerful
yet experienced in this part of the Indian Ocean," he added.

"The town of Antalaha, Madagascar's vanilla capital, looks apocalyptic,"
Soro said after a visit to the region this week. "Homes, schools, clinics
and the church were ripped apart. It was swept by winds of up to 300 kmh
as the eye of cyclone passed through last Sunday."


The toll

After newspapers in the Malagasy capital, Antananarivo, reported a
preliminary death toll of 10 on Wednesday, by Thursday, Soro said the
death toll in Antalaha alone was put at 17. Surveys of the toll in the
nearby cities of Maroantsetra and Andapa were still awaited, he said.

But the passage of the cyclone on Sunday had affected the lives of 300,000
people, of whom at least 90,000 lost their homes. Details and photographs
taken during the initial survey can be seen on a new website supported by
the French chapter of Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF): http://www.lk-oi.com/hudah/en/index.htm

"As a medical doctor, I can tell you that I saw many, many children
clearly suffering from bronchitis and diarrhoea," Soro said. "From what I
saw at Antalaha during our visit this week, the infrastructure has been 95
percent destroyed. They urgently need clothes, blankets, and shelter,
tents, plastic sheeting. The people of Antalaha are now without running
water, electricity or telephone communications."


The humanitarian response

Soro said that advance meteorological notice of the impending disaster at
the weekend had enabled the Uinted Nations and humanitarian community to
organise itself before the cyclone struck.

On Sunday, at a meeting with officials of the government relief
commission, the Conseil national de securite (CNS), he said it was decided
to dispatch an assessment team as soon as the weather permitted.

By Tuesday, two aircraft carrying senior UN, government, NGO and media
representatives flew to the disaster zone where they visited Maroantsetra,
Antalaha, and Andapa, all in the northeast of the country.

After further meetings during the week, the humanitarian community decided
to establish operational relief bases in Antalaha and Maroantsetra, from
where they will get urgent relief to people in the towns themselves and
nearby districts.

The United Nations, meanwhile, is preparing a new emergency appeal to
donors for assistance.


Major concerns

"When we visited those areas two weeks earlier, the damage wrought by the
previous cyclones in February and March was already dramatic," Soro said.
"Our biggest concerns now are providing timely food, medical assistance,
and shelter."

He said schools and clinics would have to be rebuilt, and that the
humanitarian community was now faced with "a very dramatic situation" in
coming months. "The main task will be the restoration of basic
infrastructure," he said.


MOZAMBIQUE

The WFP spokeswoman in Mozambique, Aya Schneorson told IRIN on Thursday
that wet weather that had already hit northern parts of the country was
likely to move south out of the northern Nampula Province and into the
Zambezia Province.

"It also looks as if the rains could move further south, but we don't know
for sure what is going to happen. We are monitoring the situation,"
Schneorson said.

The South African Weather Bureau said: "The cyclone is expected to remain
offshore for the next 48 hours by which time she is predicted to be 200 km
east of Beira," the bureau said.

It added that wind speeds were expected to reach 130 kmh near the centre
of the cyclone, but were not expected to "exceed gale force (more than 65
kmh), between Angoche and Beira in the north, in the next 24 hours.  
"Heavy rain can be expected along this stretch of coast with even heavier
falls possible in the Beira area on Saturday," it said.

Meanwhile, the United States said that it was sending two disaster relief
teams to Mozambique. Hugh Palmer from the US Agency for International
Development (USAID) said that the teams were being sent to "prevent loss
of life."

"These people are being proactively deployed in advance of lives being
lost," Palmer told a news briefing. Earlier this year the US government
was criticised for not reacting fast enough to the humanitarian disaster
that followed cyclone Eline.

Mozambican disaster management authorities said Thursday that the new
storm could affect up to 400,000 people in Nampula and Zambezia Provinces.
It has issued a warning to people to stay indoors, to stay away from power
lines and to secure their possessions.


Emergency not yet over

Schneorson said that the emergency in Mozambique "was far from over" and
that the situation still remained "very serious."

"It is very important to remember that we still have an emergency on our
hands. There are still tens of thousands of people in displaced camps whom
we have to take care of and the present weather conditions are not making
our jobs any easier," Schneorson said.


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