Cyclone Batsirai is due to hit eastern Madagascar on Saturday with strong winds and torrential rains posing a “very serious threat” to millions of people on the island country.
The inhabitants took shelter before the arrival of the storm with forecasts of winds of more than 200 kilometers per hour in the country, which is still recovering from the deadly tropical storm Ana at the end of January.
After passing through Mauritius and lashing the French island of Reunion with two days of torrential rain, Batsirai was 250 km east of Madagascar on Saturday morning, according to the French weather agency Meteo-France.
Batsirai is due to make landfall between late afternoon and evening on Saturday as an intense tropical cyclone, “posing a very serious threat to the area,” the agency warned.
The eye of the storm is due to cross the center of the island between late Saturday night and Sunday, before leaving the west coast of the country on Monday.
The winds could reach “more than 200 or up to 250 km/h (…) at the moment of impact”, and the waves could reach up to 15 meters, according to Meteo-France.
The UN said it had raised its alert level and had a rescue and humanitarian aid plane ready.
The impact of Batsirai in Madagascar is expected to be “considerable”, Jens Laerke, a spokesman for OCHA, the UN humanitarian agency, told reporters in Geneva on Friday.
At least 131,000 people were affected by Ana across Madagascar in January. At least 58 people were killed, mostly in the capital Antananarivo. The storm also hit Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, killing dozens of people.
The UN World Food Program (WFP) cited data from local authorities, according to which 595,000 people could be directly affected by Batsirai and another 150,000 could be displaced by landslides and floods.
“We are very nervous,” said Pasqualina Di Sirio, the head of the WFP in Madagascar, in a videoconference from the Indian Ocean country.
Search and rescue teams on the island were put on alert and residents reinforced their houses.
Sitting on the roof of his house, Tsarafidy Ben Ali, a 23-year-old charcoal seller, secured the metal sheets of the roof with bags of earth.
“The gusts of wind are going to be very strong, so I am reinforcing the roof,” he told AFP.
