IN ZIMBABWE, a family is forced to dig in search of a boy buried in the mud (pictured below). This grim scene is one of many playing out across south-east Africa in the wake of the devastation wrought by Cyclone Idai.
The extreme storm burst riverbanks, ripped down power lines and destroyed roads and farmland, forcing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and affecting millions. Winds reached 170 kilometres per hour.
The UN has confirmed that hundreds of people have been killed in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi in one of the worst storms on record to affect Africa, and maybe the entire southern hemisphere.
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But the death toll is predicted to rise much higher. Mozambique’s president Filipe Nyusi estimated that at least 1000 might have lost their lives in that country alone.
Aid groups say 90 per cent of the city of Beira, the port hit when Cyclone Idai made landfall on 14 or 15 March, has been destroyed. There are reports of hundreds of bodies washing up on the sides of a flooded road outside the city.
The storm first made landfall in Mozambique on 4 March, bringing heavy rainfalls and flooding to Malawi. It then returned to the Mozambique Channel between the mainland and Madagascar before developing into a cyclone. It made a second landfall, this time near Beira, before pushing inland to Zimbabwe’s eastern border, hitting the mountainous Chimanimani district the hardest.
Photographers
Clockwise: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP/REX/Shutterstock; Reuters/Philimon Bulawayo; Eumetsat; Adrien Barbier/AFP/Getty Images (two images); Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images; Zinyange Auntony/AFP/Getty Images
