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JOHANNESBURG – Aid groups in Madagascar were investigating the extensive damage of Hurricane Batsirai on Tuesday, the second devastating storm that ravaged the island nation in less than a month, killing more than 20 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.
The storm hit the southeast of the island Friday, battering coastal towns and villages, then moving inland and flooding their crops. Aid groups said they left the island’s west coast on Monday, causing flash flooding in a desert area.
Authorities warned the devastation and death could worsen as aid workers begin to arrive in the most severely affected areas. The United Nations Children’s Fund said it is already known that more than 60,000 people have been displaced in the island nation, located off the southeast coast of the African continent.
Over the past decade, areas of Madagascar that are not used to storms have been caught off guard as climate patterns in the southern Indian Ocean have changed. Aid agencies said the storms and consequent flooding have also become more intense, and deforestation is making the interior of the island more vulnerable.
Forming in the Indian Ocean just three weeks after the Main Tropical Storm, the new storm killed more than 70 people as it crossed Madagascar and the continental nations of Malawi and Mozambique. Madagascar was the country with the highest number of deaths with 55.
Catholic Relief Services country representative Carla Fajardo said residents in the city of Mananjary, on Madagascar’s east coast, took shelter in their homes as the storm reached landfall on Friday evening.
Faced with heavy rains and winds of up to 102 kilometers per hour, those living in wooden houses with thatched roofs are living in stronger houses, sheltering relatives and friends. When severe weather shook the concrete-block houses and ripped their roofs off, residents moved again, this time to gather at churches and other relief centers set up around the city.
As the night progressed, the wind reached speeds of 149 miles per hour, causing sea levels to rise and the town’s canals to overflow, ripping roofs off buildings and leaving thousands exposed. About 26,000 people were displaced in Mananjary alone.
The town’s hospital was also badly damaged. Ms. Fajardo said patients and staff have taken shelter in the recently built surgical and maternity wards, the only storm-proof sections of the hospital. Aid officials fear that some inmates at the local prison may not have been rescued in time.
Madagascar President Andry Rajoelina visited the devastated town on Monday, to tweet images of palm trees strewn across the road and a church with a bent corrugated metal roof.
As charities began to reach the affected areas, the damage in Mananjary marked a widespread humanitarian disaster still inaccessible to the cities. Pasqualina Di Sirio, country director of the World Food Program in Madagascar, said fruit trials have been dismantled in Mananjary and rice fields have been flooded despite the shortage of safe water.
“There are other areas that we just don’t know about,” said Ms. Di Sirio. He warned that aid may not reach these areas until the end of the week.
The damage pattern has changed from storms of past years. “Due to climate change, we are observing that the trajectory of hurricanes is changing,” said Ms. Fajardo of Catholic Relief Services.
Jean-Benoit Manhes, who works for Unicef in Madagascar, said the flooding caused by Hurricane Batsirai in the center of the country is threatening crops, making an already drought-stricken country in some areas even more susceptible to food security.
“Seventy-seven percent of the country is extremely poor, and any shock could turn the extreme poor into complete misery,” said Mr Manhes.
Mr Manhes said the capital, Antananarivo, an elevated inland city, had the most casualties during Tropical Storm Mother partly because it was not used to this “decade storm”. The city survived this time, but is already grappling with a third wave of Covid-19 infections.
While preventive evacuations have saved lives on the coasts, recovery across the country will be complex. In good weather it took several days by car and small boats to reach Mananjary. Mr Manhes said aid agencies are currently trying to reach the affected area via damaged roads and flooded rivers.
Although the south of the country has largely escaped the devastation of Hurricane Batsirai, it is in the grip of a drought that has left thousands of families in need of food aid. Major roads connecting the capital to smaller communities were destroyed by storms, further complicating efforts to relieve the drought-stricken Grand Sud region.
As Hurricane Batsirai weakened as it moved westward and was not expected to do this much damage to nearby Mozambique, it is still reeling from the Tropical Storm Ana.
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