The authorities in the French archipelago of Mayotte introduced a curfew on Tuesday as they rushed to get food and water into the territory in the aftermath of a tropical cyclone killed at least 22 people and flattened entire neighborhoods.
Hundreds or even thousands are feared dead as a result of Tropical Cyclone Chido, which barreled into Mayotte, a series of islands off the eastern coast of Africa, over the weekend, with wind gusts of up to 124 miles per hour.
Officials who toured the area said the devastation had spared no corner of the tiny archipelago, France’s poorest territory. French officials have cautioned that counting all of the victims will be difficult, because roughly a third of the territory’s 320,000 residents are undocumented immigrants, and many live in shoddily built shanty towns that were torn apart by the storm.
The curfew will be enforced from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., France’s interior ministry said, although it said that unrest and looting had been minimal.
President Emmanuel Macron is expected to visit in the coming days.
Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, the mayor of Mamoudzou, the capital, told RFI radio on Tuesday that over 1,400 people had been injured in the storm. The territory is often sheltered from the brunt of storms by neighboring Madagascar, he noted — but this time, the cyclone passed above the tip of Madagascar and hit Mayotte with full force.
“This natural phenomenon didn’t give our territory a chance,” Mr. Soumaila said.
He said that rescue workers had not yet reached many of the hillside shanty towns around Mamoudzou that were ravaged by the storm, leaving behind piles of uprooted trees and twisted corrugated iron.
“Some areas are completely devastated,” he said. “The priority today is food and water.”
Réunion, a French island about 900 miles southeast of Mayotte, has become a staging area for aid and rescue efforts. France’s interior ministry said on Monday evening that it expected half of Mayotte’s drinkable water supplies to be restored within the next 48 hours, and 95 percent within the week. The authorities also said that the territory’s single hospital would be bolstered by a field hospital in the coming days.
But the local authorities worry about the spread of disease if aid does not reach residents and if rescue workers cannot pull dead bodies out of the wreckage quickly enough.
“We could be facing a health crisis very soon,” Ben Issa Ousseni, the president of Mayotte’s local council, told local television.
Mayotte has experienced high levels of illegal immigration from nearby Comoros, and Bruno Retailleau, France’s departing interior minister, said on Monday that some undocumented residents had not taken shelter in officially designated gathering points in time. That has raised questions about whether widespread fears of arrest or deportation hampered the territory’s preparedness for to the storm.
The devastation in Mayotte comes at a delicate time for France, which is caught up in political turmoil after the prime minister and his cabinet were toppled this month.
Mr. Macron has appointed François Bayrou as the new prime minister, but Mr. Bayrou baffled many on Monday when he chose to travel to an event in the southwestern city of Pau, where he is mayor, rather than attend an emergency meeting about Mayotte in person in Paris.
Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of France’s lower house of Parliament, told Franceinfo radio, “I would have indeed preferred that the prime minister, instead of taking a plane to Pau, took a plane to Mamoudzou.”
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