Paris:
Residents of the French island of Mayotte braced for a storm expected to bring strong winds and heavy rain on Saturday, less than a month after the Indian Ocean archipelago was devastated by a deadly cyclone.
Mayotte Island was placed under a state of emergency warning from 19:00 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Saturday in anticipation of Cyclone Dikeledi passing south of the territory.
Authorities have called for “extreme vigilance” following the devastating damage caused by Cyclone Chido in mid-December.
Meteo France predicted “considerable rain and windy conditions” and said very heavy rain could cause flooding.
Residents were advised to seek shelter and stockpile food and water.
According to forecasts, the storm is expected to reach the northeastern coast of Madagascar on Saturday evening, before moving off the coast of southern Mayotte on Sunday.
“We cannot leave anything to chance,” Manuel Valls, France's new Overseas Territories Minister, told AFP, citing “heavy and continuous rain” and winds expected to reach 110 kilometers per hour. Ta.
The most devastating cyclone to hit France's poorest department in 90 years left at least 39 people dead and more than 5,600 injured in December.
“We need to seriously prepare for the possibility of an approaching cyclone,” Mayotte told X.
Governor François-Xavier Vieuxville, the territory's Paris-appointed head, said Mayotte would be under a state of emergency alert from 7pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on Saturday.
“We have decided to bring this emergency alert forward to 10 p.m. so that everyone can evacuate, stay at home and look after their loved ones, their children and their families,” Prime Minister Vieuxville said on television.
Messages in French and two regional languages were broadcast on radio and television to warn residents.
Vieuxville told reporters early Saturday that the cyclone was expected to pass within 110 kilometers of the archipelago's southern coast.
“We even have a system that tells us 75 kilometers, which means there is something that will hit very close to Mayotte,” he said.
“I'm very worried.”
But forecasters expect the cyclone to “weaken to strong tropical cyclone status by Saturday night before moving south of Mayotte offshore during the day on Sunday.”
According to the Interior Ministry, more than 4,000 personnel, including police and military, were mobilized.
The governor asked the mayor to reopen schools, gymnasiums and other accommodation facilities where about 15,000 people were evacuated in December.
He also ordered firefighters and other forces to be sent to “highly vulnerable” slums such as Mahmoud.
The possibility of landslides is a “huge risk,” the governor said.
“Thousand degrees was a dry low-pressure system with very little rain,” he added.
“This tropical cyclone is a wet phenomenon and will bring a lot of rain.”
Mayotte's official population is 320,000, but it is estimated that an additional 100,000 to 200,000 undocumented immigrants live in the shantytowns destroyed by December's cyclone.
In Mamzuu, Camelia Petre, 35, said she was taking shelter in her home, which had “held out during the raid.”
“We will accept friends and colleagues who have lost their homes,” she told AFP.
She added that she was “very concerned about vulnerable people”.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
