Madagascar cyclone death toll rises to 51
ANTANANARIVO— The death toll from a cyclone that hit Madagascar about 10 days ago has risen to 51, with another 22 people reported missing, authorities said on Sunday.
Tropical Cyclone Ava passed through Madagascar on January 5-6, hitting mostly the eastern coast of the island with wind speeds of between 140-190 kph (87-119 mph).
The death toll had been put at about 29 people a week ago. e National Office of Risk and Disaster Management said in a statement on Sunday more than 54 000 people were displaced by the cyclone.
In March 2017, Cyclone Enawo killed at least 78 people on Madagascar’s vanilla-producing northeastern coast.
Meanwhile, the search for victims of last week’s deadly Southern California mudslides pushed into yesterday, with hundreds of rescue workers with dogs and scanners hunting for four people still listed as missing after the rain-driven slides that killed 20 people.
Emergency officials said hopes were diminishing that they would pull more survivors from the ravaged landscape of hardened muck, boulders and twisted debris left behind by the Tuesday mudslides that scoured a landscape already left barren by last year’s recordsetting wildfires.
“We’re still out there with search and rescue crews who will continue to work until we can account for those four still missing,” Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokeswoman Amber Anderson said in a phone interview.
The mudslides that scoured the affluent community of Montecito, 85 miles (137 km) northwest of Los Angeles, caused the greatest loss of life from a California mudslide in at least 13 years.
Ten people perished in January 2005 when a hillside saturated by weeks of torrential rains collapsed in the seaside hamlet of La Conchita, just 18 miles (29 km) southeast of Montecito, burying more than a dozen homes in seconds.— Reuters.