Officials try to gauge storm’s effect

Floodwaters from Cyclone Idai seen continuing to rise

CHIMANIMANI, Zimbabwe — Mozambique began three days of national mourning on Wednesday for the hundreds of victims of Cyclone Idai, while the death toll in neighboring Zimbabwe rose to more than 100 from one of the most destructive storms to strike southern Africa in decades.

Torrential rains were expected to continue into Thursday and floodwaters were still rising, according to aid groups trying to get food, water and clothing to desperate survivors. It will be days before Mozambique’s inundated plains drain toward the Indian Ocean and even longer before the full scale of the devastation is known.

People have been clinging to trees and huddling on rooftops since the cyclone roared in over the weekend, and aid groups are desperately trying to rescue as many as they can. The United Nations humanitarian office said the town of Buzi, with some 200,000 people, was at risk of becoming at least partially submerged.

“Floodwaters are predicted to rise significantly in the coming days and 350,000 people are at risk,” the U.N. office said.

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa received a somber welcome in the hard-hit mountain community of Chimanimani near the border with Mozambique. Zimbabwean officials have said some 350 people may have died.

“We do not want to hear that anyone has died of hunger,” Mnangagwa said.

Clutching a bag of his few remaining possessions, Amos Makunduwa described the devastation with one stark sentence. “There is death all over,” he said.

“It is beginning to smell really bad,” he added. “The whole area is like one big body of water, huge rocks and mud. There are no houses, as if no one ever stayed here.”

The force of the flood waters swept some victims from Zimbabwe down the mountainside into Mozambique, officials said. “Some of the peasants in Mozambique were calling some of our people to say, ‘We see bodies, we believe those bodies are coming from Zimbabwe,’” said a local government minister, July Moyo.

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi said late Tuesday that more than 200 people were confirmed dead in his country. After flying over the affected region on Monday, he said he expected the death toll to be more than 1,000.