Powerful Cyclone Freddy heading towards Mozambique after hitting Madagascar – BBC News

A powerful cyclone is heading towards Mozambique and battering Madagascar, where it killed five people. Cyclone Freddy is expected to make landfall on Friday between central and southern Mozambique, more than 500 kilometres north of the capital, Maputo, and could eventually reach Zimbabwe. These pictures show the damage inflicted to eastern Madagascar. Rooves were torn off buildings with power cuts and flooding. Amongst the five killed was a 27-year-old man who drowned as part of the flooding. I'm joined now by Kat Diel, an Emergency Coms Officer at Médicin Saint-François, who joins us from Noisy-Varica in eastern Madagascar. Thank you very much for joining us here on BBC World News.

First off, I wonder if you could update us on the current conditions on the ground. Yes, absolutely. So as the cyclone hit, it was a category five cyclone when it was in the sea and it did go down to a category three when it hit the east coast. This caused some severe damage to houses. First assessments appear that it hasn't been as devastating as Bat-sur-Ais, the cyclone last year, but it's a real concern for communities who are dealing with the combination of cyclone season, with peak malaria season and lean season, where stocks are really depleted and the price of food has really reached its peak. So how are the locals managing to survive? So we visited some of the communities yesterday. There was one situation where a manager of a health facility had the roof of his house completely ripped off.

He had to find shelter in a nearby clinic with 70 other people. So people are just finding shelter where they can. They have a real fear about how they're going to feed themselves and their families. And of course, it is cyclone season. So in terms of mitigating further effects of storm weather, what can be done? What is being done? Yes, so we're working in collaboration with the government crisis response. So they're coordinating all of the efforts. We're providing information to them and we're supporting over 30 local health facilities to make sure that we can bring support where it's needed, along with other organisations.

So the main things here are really to make sure that we're treating people affected by severe malnutrition and diagnosing and treating people who are really at crisis point. And also that obviously people, well, locals have been planting, you know, it's time to plant your fields and when it comes to harvesting, what are they going to have to harvest? It's a good question. We spoke to several women before the storm hits in Ambojian, which is just north of where I am now. And they have just planted rice crops. It takes about three or four months for this rice to mature. And they told me there's no plan B. There's no plan B if these rice fields are destroyed.

Their stocks, which they were able to keep in their home since the last cyclone hit, are now depleted. So they're really waiting to see what help is going to come, what help is going to arrive for them.

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