JOHANNESBURG (AP) – The Mozambican port city of Beira breathed a sigh of relief on Saturday when cyclone Eloise caused less damage than it went through, but the flood danger remains in a region that still recovered from a devastating two years ago cyclone.
“We all feel that it was much less than we expected,” said Kobus Botha, head of the farming and logistics company Servir. “If you remember in Idai (Cyclone), we all said ‘This is not bad’, but 24 hours later the big waters came. ‘Idai killed hundreds of people in 2019 and displaced more than 100,000 people.
Prior to the arrival of the cyclone, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies warned that at least 100,000 people would be affected.
“Heavy rainfall will last longer than 24 hours,” he said. ‘The amount of rain will be sufficient to flood low areas of Beira and Buzi. Further floods could occur a few days later as water accumulated from the Pungue and Buzi rivers flowed from Zimbabwe. ”
In a more likely scenario, the IFRC expects 400,000 people to be affected, as torrential rains immediately flood the low-lying areas of Beira, Buzi, Nhamatanda, Chibabava and Sussundenga. The accumulation of water in Zimbabwe will flow downstream and increase the flooded areas for several days. ”
The eye of the storm passed over Beira before dawn on Saturday after it had already brought heavy rain in the province of Zambezia and the capital Quelimane. The cyclone lost power after landing, but removed electricity and communications infrastructure in Beira, a city of about half a million people, and surrounding areas.
“The Vodacom network has registered a temporary outage … cutting off communications for users throughout the city of Beira and in certain districts of Sofala province,” Vodacom said in a statement.
The electrical company EDM said it had turned off the power as a precaution after water ended up in a substation in Beira, local outlet Carta de Mocambique reported.
“If you look in the distance from here, you can see roof tiles missing here and there everywhere,” said Ben Van Wyk, a resident of Beira. ‘But the mayor (Daviz Simango) was a master of preparation. The whole of Beira put sandbags on their roofs yesterday, ”while municipal authorities turned over cloths to remove sand from the beach.
Eloise is the second cyclone to hit central Mozambique this season, after Chalane in December. But since Idai, “people now know what a cyclone is and take it seriously,” Van Wyk said.