France said it will impose a nighttime curfew on the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte starting on the evening of Tuesday, December 17, after the French overseas territory was devastated by a cyclone feared to have killed hundreds.
According to the latest official toll, 21 people are confirmed to have been killed by Cyclone Chido when it barrelled into the island and its surrounding archipelago at the weekend. But authorities fear that hundreds, and possibly even thousands, were killed, once the true scale of the toll is revealed, after the rubble is cleared and roads unblocked.
The health services are in tatters, power and mobile phone services have been knocked out, the airport closed to civilian flights while there is mounting concern about how to ensure supplies of drinking water.
Cyclone Chido is the latest in a string of storms worldwide fuelled by climate change, according to experts. The curfew from 10 pm to 4 am local time (1900 GMT to 0100 GMT) is being put in place as a security measure to prevent looting, the French interior ministry said.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who chaired a crisis meeting on Monday night, has described the situation as a "tragedy" and promised to visit Mayotte in the coming days. Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who on Monday was the first top Paris official to visit the island after the cyclone, said that Mayotte has been "completely devastated," with 70% of inhabitants affected. "The toll will be heavy, too heavy," Retailleau warned.
He announced the arrival "in the coming days" of 400 additional gendarmes to reinforce the 1,600 gendarmes and police officers present on the archipelago, while specifying that there had "not really been any looting" so far. The "exceptional" cyclone was super-charged by particularly warm Indian Ocean waters, meteorologist Francois Gourand of the Meteo France weather service told AFP.
Mayotte is France's poorest region, with an estimated one third of the population living in shantytowns whose flimsy sheet metal-roofed homes offered scant protection against the storm. "We're starting to run out of water. In the south, there's been no running water for five days," said Antoy Abdallah, a resident of Tsoundzou in the territory's capital Mamoudzou. "We're completely cut off from the world," the 34-year-old lamented.
Most of Mayotte's population is Muslim and religious tradition dictates bodies must be buried rapidly, meaning some may never be counted. And assessing the toll is further complicated by irregular immigration to Mayotte, especially from the Comoros islands to the north, meaning much of the population is not even registered.
Mayotte officially has 320,000 inhabitants but authorities estimate there could be 100,000 to 200,000 more people, taking into account illegal immigration. Ousseni Balahachi, a former nurse, said some people did not dare venture out to seek assistance, "fearing it would be a trap" designed to remove them from Mayotte. Many had stayed put "until the last minute" when it proved too late to escape the cyclone, she added.