# France rushes aid to Mayotte after Cyclone Chido leaves officials fearing thousands dead
*Event date: 2024-12-15*
France is rushing rescue workers and emergency supplies to Mayotte after Cyclone Chido tore through the Indian Ocean territory with winds of close to 225 km/h, The Independent reported. The storm smashed housing, hospitals, schools and government buildings, leaving authorities struggling to determine how many people were killed.
The uncertainty over the death toll is part of what makes the disaster so severe. Prefect Francois-Xavier Bieuville said the toll could reach “a thousand, even several thousands,” while the French interior ministry warned that it would be difficult to account for all the victims. A separate official count published by local television, Mayotte la 1ere, put the confirmed death toll at 20, but that figure was widely presented as incomplete.
In Mamoudzou, the capital, residents described the aftermath as total destruction. The French Red Cross called the devastation “unimaginable,” saying rescuers were still searching for bodies in the rubble. The report said the poorer slum neighbourhoods, made up of metal shacks and other informal structures, were hit particularly hard, which could make the final toll even harder to verify because of how quickly some burials take place in Muslim communities.
The infrastructure damage complicates the response. The main airport suffered significant damage, including to its air traffic control tower, meaning only military aircraft could fly in at first. France began airlifting medical personnel and emergency workers from Réunion, and officials said more than 800 additional personnel were expected in the following days. The report also said military rations and generators were being delivered as people in shelters faced shortages of water, power and food.
The island’s social conditions make the storm’s aftermath even more dangerous. More than three-quarters of the roughly 320,000 residents live below the poverty line, and Mayotte has long struggled with shortages, unrest and pressure from migration flows. In that context, a cyclone that destroys housing and knocks out basic services can quickly become a larger humanitarian crisis.
Chido also hit northern Mozambique, but the packet’s main focus is on Mayotte, where the most immediate problem is still the scale of the death toll and the difficulty of counting it. The report makes clear that France’s first job is not only to rescue survivors but also to reach the dead and the missing in a landscape that was, in the words of one resident, turned into chaos.
