Thousands await rescue

International aid agencies raced on Wednesday to rescue survivors and meet spiralling humanitarian needs in three impoverished countries battered by one of the worst storms to hit southern Africa in decades.

Five days after tropical cyclone Idai cut a swathe through Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, the confirmed death toll stood at more than 300 and hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk, officials said.

“We’ve thousands of people in roofs and trees waiting for rescue,” International Federation of Red Cross spokesperson Caroline Haga said in the storm-ravaged Mozambican city of Beira.

“We are running out of time. People have been waiting for rescue for more than three days now,” she said.

“Yesterday we rescued some 167 people from trees and roofs.

“Today we’ll continue that. “Unfortunately we can’t pick up all the people, so our priority is children, pregnant women, injured people.”

Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi said on Tuesday 202 people had died, according to the latest toll, and nearly 350,000 people were risk.

He announced three days of national mourning on Wednesday.

In Zimbabwe, the death toll stood at 100 on Wednesday but was expected to surge to 300, while up to 15,000 people are estimated to have been hit by the storm.

In Malawi, nearly a million people have been affected and more than 80,000 forced from their homes.

Aid agencies said they had been prepared for the cyclone, which made landfall early on Friday, but not for the massive floods that followed.

Mozambique bore the brunt from rivers that flow downstream from its neighbours.

“No-one was prepared for the floods. The cyclone caused torrential rains in Zimbabwe and Malawi and all the water came here,” Haga said.

“Two rivers have overflowed and there is flooding, we have several metres of high water.”

Beira airport, which was damaged by the storm and temporarily shut, had reopened to become the relief operations hub but is proving not large enough.

Air force personnel from Mozambique and South Africa have been drafted in to fly rescue missions and distribute aid.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said it was mobilising aid for about 600,000 people, but warned the world had yet to appreciate the scale of the massive disaster.

So far, it has dispatched more than five tons of emergency provisions to the affected areas.