14 killed: Will take days to know full toll

PARIS, Dec 15 (AFP): At least 14 people were killed in Mayotte when a fierce cyclone battered the French Indian Ocean territory, authorities said Sunday, with officials warning it will take days to know the full toll.

Rescue workers and supplies are being rushed in by air and sea, but their efforts are likely to be hindered by damage to airports and electricity distribution in a territory where even clean drinking water was already subject to chronic shortages.

The toll of 14 was counted in a provisional list compiled by authorities, a security source told AFP.

Nine people were gravely wounded and fighting for their lives in hospital, said Ambdilwahedou Soumaila, mayor of Mayotte's capital Mamoudzou, while 246 more were seriously injured.

Mayotte's 320,000 residents had been ordered into lockdown as cyclone Chido bore down on the islands around 500 kilometres (310 miles) east of Mozambique.

Its gusts of at least 226 kilometres per hour had "completely destroyed" the territory's many shantytowns, acting Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said following a crisis meeting in Paris late Saturday.

Electricity poles were hurled to the ground, trees uprooted and sheet-metal roofs and walls torn off improvised structures inhabited by at least one-third of the population.

"It will take several days" to establish the full death toll, but "we fear that it is heavy", Retailleau added.

Retailleau will travel to Mayotte on Monday, his office said, alongside 160 soldiers and firefighters to reinforce the 110 already deployed to the islands from mainland France ahead of the storm.

Medical personnel and equipment were being delivered from Sunday by air and sea, said the prefecture in La Reunion, another French Indian Ocean territory some 1,400 kilometres away on the other side of Madagascar.

"We are continuing to evaluate the needs of emergency services and the population to organise the schedule" of deployment, the prefecture said in a statement.

"Everything has been swept away, everything is razed," said Mounira, a woman whose house was destroyed in the Kaweni district in Mamoudzou's east-France's largest shantytown.

More than 15,000 homes are without electricity, acting Environment Minister Agnes-Pannier Runacher has said, while telephone access is severely limited even for emergency calls.

Acting Transport Minister Francois Durovray wrote on X that the Pamandzi airport on Petite-Terre, the smaller of Mayotte's two major islands, had "suffered major damage".

And Health Minister Genevieve Darrieussecq said the entire territory's health system had been "severely affected", with "major material damage to the Mayotte hospital centre".

Just northwest of Mayotte, the Comoros islands, some of which had been on red alert since Friday, were also hit, though less hard than the neighbouring archipelago, said national civil security chief Abderemane Mahmoud.