By Tassilo Hummel
MAMOUDZOU (Reuters) -French President Emmanuel Macron faced pleas for urgent help and promised to send reinforcements during a visit to storm-ravaged Mayotte on Thursday as heavy rains piled further misery on an estimated 100,000 people left homeless by Cyclone Chido.
Thousands are feared dead, with one lawmaker warning that the scale of the calamity had forced people to bury victims in mass graves in France’s poorest overseas territory, which is reeling from the worst storm to hit it in 90 years.
Many areas in the Indian Ocean archipelago remain inaccessible and officials have only been able to confirm 31 fatalities more than five days after Chido struck and left a trail of destruction.
As Macron disembarked from a plane packed with four tonnes of food and medical aid, airport workers pleaded with him for support, pool reporters said.
“Take your time. Stay with us. Give us solutions. Give us emergency help, because in Mayotte, there is nothing,” an airport security worker named Assane Haloi told him.
Crowds gathered outside booed the presidential motorcade as it left for a hospital, where lawmaker Estelle Youssoufa told Macron that people had been buried in mass graves.
“We are facing open-air mass graves, there are no rescuers, no one has come to collect the buried bodies,” she said.
Officials have warned it will be difficult to work out how many have died in a territory that is home to large numbers of undocumented migrants from Comoros, Madagascar and other countries.
Some victims were buried immediately, in accordance with Muslim tradition, before their deaths could be counted.
Macron said his government would send more help soon, raising the number of gendarmes from 800 to 1,200. Communication services will be restored within days so anxious relatives can track down news of their missing family members, he said.
“We all have to get together. From the first day people mobilized day and night. We must not divide ourselves,” he said.
DISEASE FEARS
Heavy rain in the capital Mamoudzou and other areas has deepened the plight of thousands of people whose shantytown dwellings were flattened.
“When we got here it was all devastated, nothing was standing,” El-Yassine Ibrahim told Reuters in Doujani, a poor neighbourhood south of Mamoudzou.
“Everything was ravaged. Since then, little by little, we’ve been sorting and gathering things, and we’ll see what we do next,” he said, as his relatives combed through the rubble.
With many homes lacking running water, Mayotte residents crowded water distributions points and wells to fill up jerrycans and buckets. Others did laundry or washed themselves in rivers.
“All the pipes are broken everywhere. There is no more water in Mayotte. We need water to do the housework, to cook, to wash, to bathe. To drink water, we buy it in the stores,” Zalahta M’Madi, 44, said on Wednesday.
“No one tells us whether the water will be back tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or in a month. So we are all worried.”
Others said they were organising themselves as no officials had appeared in their neighbourhood.
Macron, whose government has been accused by opposition politicians of neglecting Mayotte, was also due to visit an affected neighbourhood and meet officials, the presidency said.
Health workers say they are bracing for a surge of disease as dead bodies lie unburied and people struggle to get clean drinking water.
Official statistics put Mayotte’s population at 321,000, but many say it is much higher.
The death toll in continental Africa, where the storm hit after passing through Mayotte, stood at 45 in Mozambique and 13 in Malawi, officials in those countries said.
(Reporting by Tassilo Hummel; Additional reporting by Gabriel Stargardter, Makini Brice and Michel Rose in Paris; writing by Ammu Kannampilly and Aaron Ross; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Angus MacSwan)
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