Cyclone Idai Flooding

On April 15 2019, a Facebook user shared images and a status update (archived here) about purported deadly flooding in Mozambique after a huge cyclone ripped through southeastern Africa:

The text shared with the photographs said:

Did yall know that Mozambique, Africa has been flooding for over 2wks now and at least 1,000. are pronounced dead?? Villages have been washed away by floods. If this was the UK or France; our social media profile pics would be changed to their flags!!!…smh! This is SO sad!!???? I’ve seen NOTHING on TV. I took this off someone’s page

A reverse image search returned an Imgur result from March 2019:

It is true that Cyclone Idai has caused widespread devastation and suffering in Mozambique, and in fact even this post pointing out the fact that it has not been covered thoroughly leaves out the damage the cyclone did to Malawi and Zimbabwe as well. However, it correctly points out that this severe weather event has not dominated world headlines, which is particularly striking since it was characterized from the first as “catastrophic” and one of the worst weather-related disasters to ever affect the Southern Hemisphere:

A combination of highly concentrated rainfall, low-lying land and poor-quality housing and infrastructure made Cyclone Idai — which hit southeastern Africa on 14 March — one of the Southern Hemisphere’s deadliest storms, say researchers.

The tropical cyclone made landfall in the Mozambican city of Beira on 14 March, and has killed more than 750 people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi — making it the second deadliest cyclone to hit the Southern Hemisphere.

Flooding caused by the storm has displaced thousands of people and some 1.85 million people have been affected so far in Mozambique alone, the United Nations estimates. Officials warn that the death toll is likely to rise.

Past major storms in the Southern Hemisphere include a cyclone that hit the Indonesian island of Flores in 1973, killing 1,650 people. Cyclones that struck Madagascar in 1972 and 1994 did not cause as many deaths, but each affected 2.5 million people (see ‘Southern cyclones’).

And unlike the island of Madagascar, where tropical cyclones occur every year, such storms make landfall in Mozambique only about once every 10 years, meaning the country is poorly prepared to deal with their severe effects, says Jennifer Fitchett, a physical geographer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

An April 21 2019 article in the UK’s Independent lamented a lack of global concern for the plight of those affected by the flooding:

I wonder what else we need to do to draw the gaze of the world back to this nation. Cyclone Idai has affected nearly 3 million people across Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, with more than 600 confirmed deaths in Mozambique alone. And now a second wave of disaster has struck as cholera cases are climbing by the day, now almost 5,000 in Mozambique despite feverish efforts to bring emergency water, sanitation and hygiene, and cholera vaccinations.

On April 23 2019, Bloomberg and Gizmodo’s Earther reported that a second storm, Cyclone Kenneth, endangered the areas still struggling to recover from Cyclone Idai:

Mozambique is still reeling from Cyclone Idai, which struck the country hard [in March 2019], claiming over 1,000 lives across the region. Now a new cyclone is on the horizon, threatening to stretch already thin resources even thinner.

Cyclone Kenneth is chugging from the Pacific toward Mozambique. Currently the equivalent of a tropical storm with sustained winds of about 52 mph, the cyclone is expected to strengthen in the coming days. Cyclone Kenneth is forecast to strafe the island nation of Comoros before plowing into Mozambique’s northern coast on [April 25 or 26 2019].

An April 15 2019 Facebook post stated that devastating floods had killed more than 1,000 people in Mozambique and that the story received little attention globally. Both statements are accurate, although the devastation extended into Zimbabwe and Malawi as well; as of April 24 2019, a second cyclone was poised to potentially bring even more devastation to the region.