Race to save marooned survivors

Rescue workers in Mozambique were racing against time to pluck people off trees and rooftops on Tuesday after a monster storm reaped a feared harvest of more than 1,000 lives before smashing into Zimbabwe.

This comes as the UN said it was mobilising aid for about 600,000 people in Mozambique, warning the world did not yet appreciate the scale of the massive disaster.

Four days after Tropical Cyclone Idai made landfall, torrential rains and powerful winds, combined with flash floods that have swept away roads and bridges, inflicted further pain on the two countries.

More than a thousand people are feared to have died in Mozambique alone while scores have been killed and more than 200 are missing in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

Emergency teams in central Mozambique set off in boats in an inland sea of floodwater, nabbing survivors from treetops and roofs, even in the dead of night.

The South African military and the Mozambican army have deployed their air force in the effort to save lives, while a South African NGO called Rescue SA said it had saved 34 people since Friday night, using three helicopters.

It is striving to hire more. “It is the only way to access the people that are stranded,” Rescue SA’s Abrie Senekal said.

Its team was having to make potentially life-or-death decisions about whom to save, the organisation’s head, Ian Scher, said.

“Sometimes we can only save two out of five, sometimes we rather drop food and go to someone else who’s in bigger danger,” he said.

“There’s two issues at the same time: people stranded in trees, and people stranded on houses or new islands that have no food. We just save what we can save and the others will perish,” he said.

President Filipe Nyusi on Monday said the Pungwe and Buzi rivers in central Mozambique had burst their banks and engulfed entire villages.

“Communities are isolated and bodies are floating on the waters,” he said.

“This is a real humanitarian disaster. More than 100,000 people are in danger.”

Emma Beaty, co-ordinator of a grouping of NGOs known as Cosaco, warned of the peril from dams filled to the brim by the floodwater.

“Some dams have broken, and others have reached full capacity, they’ll very soon open the flood gates,” she said.

In neighbouring Zimbabwe, Idai left 98 dead and at least 217 more missing.

The most affected area is Chimanimani in Manicaland province, which borders Mozambique.

Families started burying their dead on Monday in damp graves, and survivors with injuries filled up hospitals.

The UN’s World Food Programme said it had already dispatched more than five tons of emergency provisions.

“WFP aims to support 500,000 to 600,000 people in the coming weeks,” spokesperson Herve Verhoosel said in Geneva.

“I don’t think that the world [has] realised yet the scale of the problem,” he said.