After deadly cyclone — crocodiles and snakes

Flood disaster overwhelms Mozambique

BEIRA • Hundreds of corpses had washed up on the side of the road. Others bobbed past his stranded car, carried by the torrents of floodwater towards the sea. But what will forever haunt Graham Taylor were the screams and sounds of sobbing that echoed through the night from those clinging to life in the upper branches of trees.

The full scale of the disaster unleashed on Mozambique by Cyclone Idai remains uncertain. But the testimony by Taylor hints at the magnitude of the tragedy unfolding in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Stranded in the floods unleashed by Idai after it made landfall near the port of Beira last week, Taylor, a Zimbabwean living in Mozambique, abandoned his car on Monday and walked 25 kilometres along a raised road to safety in the village of Nhamatanda.

His six-hour walk revealed a scene of “carnage and death.”

“People were on the rooftops and in the eucalyptus, mango and cashew nut trees,” he said. On drier land, hundreds of survivors searched in the dark for missing members of their families.

By the light of his mobile phone, he counted bodies as he walked, estimating up to 400 seen floating in the water or washed up on to the road, where survivors and relatives stood over the corpses, weeping in grief.

Yet for many who survived the initial onslaught, it is already too late. A South African pilot told colleagues at Beira’s airport that he had seen up to 250 people stranded on a small hill surrounded by floodwater to the south of the city. But by the time a rescue mission could be co-ordinated — delayed, the pilot said, after a local government official insisted on commandeering a plane to see the scene for himself — it was too late. The hill had been flooded over, with everyone on it presumed drowned.

Nothing has come to symbolize the disaster as much as its tree people.

The cyclone dumped 60 centimetres of water onto the plains of Mozambique, causing rivers to burst their banks. When the first torrents came flooding through their villages, often with little warning beyond the roar of the water, those who managed to scramble to safety must have seen the trees as their salvation. Three days later, the branches had been transformed from places of refuge into dangerous prisons. Snakes slithered along them, crocodiles lurked in the waters below, but the greatest enemy was weakness from lack of food and exhaustion.

Sleep was the biggest danger: succumbing meant being tipped into the rapids, the peril accentuated by the fact that few could swim.