Record-breaking Cyclone Freddy Kills More Than 220 People

By Staff, Agencies

Tropical Cyclone Freddy hit the coast of Southern Africa for a second time over the weekend, bringing its total death toll to more than 220 people in Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar.

The month-long storm has broken at least one record and could break two more, meteorologists say. As climate change causes warmer oceans, heat energy from the water’s surface is fueling stronger storms.

By Tuesday afternoon, authorities counted 190 people dead in Malawi with hundreds more injured and missing. The official death toll in neighboring Mozambique stood at 20.

Many of the dead were killed by mudslides in hilly Blantyre, Malawi’s second-biggest city. Torrential rain swept away thousands of homes and uprooted trees, leaving residents staring in disbelief at huge ravines in the roads and having to clamber across makeshift bridges as the rain continued.

Bodies were still being brought out from the devastation. The scale of the damage and loss of life is still unknown as search and rescue operations continue.

Almost 60,000 people have been affected, of which about 19,000 were displaced from their homes, Malawi’s government said.

Freddy developed off the coast of Australia, crossed the entire south Indian Ocean, and travelled more than 8,000km to make landfall in Madagascar and Mozambique in late February.

It then looped back and hit the coast of Mozambique again two weeks later before moving inland to Malawi.

Freddy holds the record for most accumulated cyclone energy [ACE] – a measure based on a storm’s wind strength over its lifetime – of any storm in the southern hemisphere and possibly worldwide.

Freddy has generated about as much accumulated cyclone energy as an average full North Atlantic hurricane season, according to the World Meteorological Organization [WMO].

By last week it was in second place for the most accumulated cyclone energy of any storm since 1980, with the record held by Hurricane and Typhoon Ioke in 2006.

Some estimates show Freddy has since broken that record with 86 ACE compared with Ioke’s 85 ACE.