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BEIRA (Mozambique) – Rescuers said they would reach hundreds of people yesterday still stranded more than a week after a powerful cyclone struck Mozambique and swathes of southeast Africa, as roads started to reopen.

Cyclone Idai lashed Mozambique’s port city of Beira with winds of up to 170kph around midnight on March 14, then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings and killing at least 657 people across the three countries.

“We are more organised now, after the chaos that we’ve had, so we’re delivering food and shelter to more people today,” Mozambique’s Land and Environment Minister Celso Correia said.

Correia said the number of people in makeshift camps had risen by 18 000 to 128 000 since Sunday, most of them in the Beira area.

Communities near Nhamatanda, around 100km north-west of Beira and where some people haven’t received aid for days, expected to receive assistance yesterday, he added.

The cyclone and the heavy rains that followed hampered aid efforts and blocked deliveries of food and other essentials from Beira, which is an important gateway to landlocked countries in the region.

The water covering vast tracts of land west of the port has been receding, but the size of the disaster zone makes getting aid to the most needy difficult.

Sebastian Rhodes Stampa, from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said cases of diarrhoea in Mozambique were increasing and they were keeping a close watch out for any outbreak of cholera.

“It’s a killer,” Rhodes Stampa said of cholera, naming the infection as one of his biggest concerns, alongside more flooding.

But the weather for the next two weeks looked “pretty good” and dam releases were well-controlled, he added.

Correia said the death toll in Mozambique remained roughly unchanged at 447 yesterday. 

Meanwhile, the people of Beira, Mozambique, need food.

In some remote areas, which aren’t easily accessible to aid workers, residents are forced to fight each other for something to eat.

In a video filmed on Sunday, people living in the district of Nhamatanda are seen scuffling over loaves of bread.

Bread, or pão, can cost anything from 6 to 15 Mozambican metical (R1.40-R4.00).

One local told News24 the men distributing the bread from the back of a van were “popular entertainers” from Beira’s CBD. 

Nhamatanda is a rural town, roughly 100km from the city centre. Access to food and clean water continue to be a problem. 

The people here are heavily reliant on subsistence farming. Locals usually farm maize, potatoes and rice.   

When Cyclone Idai hit the shores of Mozambique and Malawi on Thursday evening, it destroyed everything in its wake. 

Beira, which is one of Mozambique’s largest cities, received the lion’s share of the devastation. 

Cast iron billboards advertising multi-national brands such as Coca-Cola were bent and laid strewn on the port city’s pavements. 

Trees were toppled, and homes flattened.

– Reuters