At least 200 people are now confirmed dead in Malawi after Tropical Storm, Freddy, ripped through southern Africa for the second time in a month.
Terrifying amounts of brown water have cascaded through neighbourhoods, sweeping away homes.
Malawi’s commercial hub, Blantyre, has recorded most of the deaths, 158, including 36 in a landslide.
The government has declared a state of disaster in 10 southern districts that have been hardest-hit by the storm. Rescue workers are overwhelmed, and are using shovels to try to find survivors buried in mud.
“We have rivers overflowing, we have people being carried away by running waters, we have buildings collapsing,” police spokesman, Peter Kalaya, told the BBC.
The government’s disaster relief agency said the death toll had risen from 99 on Monday to 200. More than 20, 000 people have been displaced, it added.
Officials at the main referral hospital in Blantyre said they could not cope with the sheer number of bodies that they were receiving.
They appealed to bereaved families to collect the corpses for burial as the hospital’s mortuary was running out of space. The death toll is expected to rise as some areas remain cut off because of relentless rain and fierce wind.
The storm has also crippled Malawi’s power supply, with most parts of the country experiencing prolonged blackouts.
The national electricity company said it was unable to get its hydro-power plant working as it had been filled with debris.
Densely-populated poorer communities, living in brick and mud houses, have been hardest-hit. Some of these houses have crumbled into flood waters, while others have been entirely swept away.
The United Nations (UN) and other agencies have warned that the timing of the storm could exacerbate a cholera outbreak – one of Malawi’s worst public health crises.
The government has appealed for help for the tens of thousands of people who have been left without food and shelter.
On Sunday, the storm struck Mozambique as a cyclone – for the second time in a less than a month – after battering the island nation of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, causing severe destruction. —BBC
