MANANJARY: The death toll from Madagascar’s latest cyclone rose to 29 on Tuesday as residents of a devastated coastal town tried to fix their homes or build temporary shacks from wood and palm fronds scattered by the violent winds.

Cyclone Batsirai slammed into the Indian Ocean island late on Saturday, battering the southeastern coastline until it moved away late on Sunday, leaving 91,000 people with damaged or dest­royed homes, according to the state disaster relief agency.

It was Madagascar’s second destructive storm in two weeks, after Cyclone Ana killed 55 people and displaced 130,000 in a different area of the country, further north.

The island nation, which has a population of nearly 30 million, was already struggling with food shortages in the south, a consequence of a severe and prolonged drought. The World Food Programme said Batsirai had made the situation worse by destroying crops that were just two weeks from harvest.

In Mananjary, one of the worst affected towns, entire neighbourhoods had been flattened, with planks of wood, palm fronds, clothing and household items strewn everywhere. A long sandy beach was covered in debris.

“Our TV, my CD player, all of our clothing, all the kitchenware, everything is gone,” said resident Philibert Jean-Claude Razananoro, 49, surveying his collapsed home.

He and his family were staying in a school, designated as an evacuation centre by the government, but they had been told they would have to leave at the weekend for lessons to resume next week.

“We plan to build a small shack just here but we don’t really have the means to do it,” he said, appealing to the international community to help.

Many other residents were hammering at toppled wooden walls, seeking to separate out individual planks to start rebuilding, but the task was daunting. Drone footage filmed by Reuters showed vast areas where almost nothing was left standing.

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2022