Issued on:
Cyclone Batsirai weakened overnight but floods were still expected due to heavy rain after it hit eastern Madagascar with strong winds, the island’s meteorological office said Sunday.
“Batsirai has weakened,” Meteo Madagascar said, adding that the cyclone’s average wind speed had almost halved to 80 kilometres per hour (50 miles per hour), while the strongest gusts had scaled back to 110 km/h from the 235 km/h recorded when it made landfall on Saturday evening.
The cyclone, the second storm to hit the large Indian Ocean island nation in just a few weeks, was moving westwards at a rate of 19 km/h, the meteorological services said.
But “localised or generalised floods are still feared following the heavy rains,” it said, adding that Batsirai should emerge at sea in the Mozambique Channel later Sunday.
Batsirai made landfall in Mananjary district, more than 530 kilometres (310 miles) southeast of the capital Antananarivo, around 8 pm local time (1700 GMT) Saturday.
It reached the island as an “intense tropical cyclone”, packing winds of 165 kilometres per hour (102 miles per hour), Faly Aritiana Fabien of the country’s disaster management agency told AFP.
The national meteorological office has said it fears “significant and widespread damage”.
Just an hour and a half after it first hit land, nearly 27,000 people had been counted as displaced from their homes, Fabien said.
He said his office has accommodation sites, food and medical care ready for victims, as well as search and rescue plans already in place.
‘Very serious threat’
The Meteo-France weather service had earlier predicted Batsirai would present “a very serious threat” to Madagascar, after passing Mauritius and drenching the French island of La Reunion with torrential rain for two days.
In the hours before the cyclone hit, residents hunkered down in the impoverished…
Source : france24
