MAPUTO, March 10 (Portal) – Tropical Storm Freddy is set to hit the coast of southern Africa again early Saturday after killing at least 27 people in Mozambique and Madagascar since it first made landfall last month.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, which said the current record is held by a 31-day hurricane in 1994, Freddy is one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the southern hemisphere.
Freddy was first named on February 6th 33 days ago.
More than 171,000 people were affected after the cyclone swept through southern Mozambique two weeks ago, bringing heavy rains and flooding that damaged crops and destroyed homes, according to the United Nations humanitarian organization OCHA.
OCHA put Freddy’s latest death toll on Friday at 27, with 10 in Mozambique and 17 in Madagascar.
Up to 565,000 people could be at risk this time in Mozambique in Zambezia, Tete, Sofala and Nampula provinces, with Zambezia expected to be hardest hit, according to the country’s national disaster management agency.
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[1/2] Winds and rain continue to gather strength as Cyclone Freddy makes landfall over Vilankulos, Mozambique, on February 24, 2023 in this screenshot taken from a social media video. UNICEF MOZAMBIQUE/2023/Guy Taylor/via Portal
Central Region Director Nelson Ludovico said the agency was preparing for the storm to make landfall in the early hours of Saturday and had moved people to makeshift shelters.
“It’s a slow-moving cyclone. That’s bad news in terms of rain because it means it’s hovering fairly close to shore and picking up more moisture so the rain will be heavier,” Clare Nullis, spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told reporters in Geneva.
The storm is likely to bring extreme rainfall over much of Mozambique, as well as northeastern Zimbabwe, southeastern Zambia and Malawi, she said.
Around the world, climate change is making hurricanes wetter, windier and more intense, scientists say. The oceans absorb much of the heat from greenhouse gas emissions, and as warm seawater evaporates, its thermal energy is released into the atmosphere, fueling more powerful storms.
According to the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, Freddy set a record for the highest accumulated cyclone energy, a measure of the storm’s strength over time, of any Southern Hemisphere storm in history.
The storm itself generated about as much accumulated cyclonic energy as an average North Atlantic hurricane season, Nullis said.
“World record or not, Freddy will definitely remain an exceptional phenomenon for the history of the southwestern Indian Ocean in many respects: longevity, distance traveled, remarkable maximum intensity, amount of cyclone energy accumulated (and) impact on inhabited land,” said Sebastien Langlade, a Cyclone forecasters at the Regional Specialized Meteorological Center in La Réunion, in a WMO statement.
Reporting by Nellie Peyton in Johannesburg and Manuel Mucari in Maputo; Additional reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber in Geneva and Bhargav Acharya in Johannesburg; Edited by Alexander Winning, Angus MacSwan and Christina Fincher
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