Cyclone Freddy’s deadly trail of destruction in south-eastern Africa

By Julia Evans, JOHANNESBURG South Africa

A Russian Su-27 jet fighter collided with an American MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, the US military's European Command said.

 Locals are evacuated from flooded areas in Maputo, Mozambique

Tropical Cyclone Freddy has become the longest-lived tropical cyclone on record and the first tropical cyclone to hit both Mozambique and Madagascar twice.

“Initially, 14 people lost their lives in Madagascar and Mozambique. But after the second landfall, the loss of life was much greater,” SA Weather Service (SAWS) forecaster Wayne Venter told our reporter, with the death toll on Tuesday surpassing 200.

In an unprecedented turn of events, after making landfall in Madagascar on 21 February and Mozambique on 24 February, instead of continuing westwards as tropical cyclones typically do, Freddy returned to the Mozambique Channel, gathering energy from the ocean, and hitting Madagascar again before heading back to Mozambique.

Freddy made its second landfall in Mozambique on 11 March, displacing 22,000 people (with 10 confirmed deaths by Tuesday) and then moved inland towards southern Malawi.

As the death toll in Malawi neared 100, President Lazarus Chakwera declared a State of Disaster in the southern region of the country on Monday.

On Tuesday afternoon, the Department of Disaster Management Affairs in Malawi reported the death toll had risen from 99 to 190, with 584 injured and 37 reported missing.

Francois Engelbrecht, a professor of climatology and the director of the Global Change Institute at Wits University, said Freddy is the longest-lived tropical cyclone on record. The period from when it first attained tropical cyclone status to the last day that it had tropical cyclone status was 35 days, although at times it weakened into a tropical low.

SAWS forecaster Venter said the previous record was held by Hurricane John in 1994 — 31 days — but meteorologists were still awaiting confirmation of Freddy’s record from the World Meteorological Organization.

Along with climate change making cyclones more intense — read this if you’re not convinced — Engelbrecht said that in a warmer world, it’s logical that tropical cyclones will last longer too. 

He explained that tropical cyclones need warm tropical water, with sea surface temperatures higher than 27°C to maintain their intensity. When a system is over colder water, or if it encounters unfavourable circulation in the atmosphere, it can lose its tropical cyclone status.

“It is actually very logical that in a warmer world, where the tropical oceans are also getting warmer and where regions such as the Mozambique Channel are also getting warmer, we should expect that conditions are becoming generally more favourable to maintain tropical cyclones,” said Engelbrecht.

Along with lots of heat being exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, evaporation also occurs.

“The warmer the sea surface temperature is, the more evaporation takes place from the ocean into the atmosphere,” said Engelbrecht, explaining that rising air in a tropical cyclone leads to the condensation of water vapour.

That latent heat from the water vapour is released into the storm when the water vapour condensates to form clouds, providing additional energy. 

“This disaster is unprecedented,” said John Chipeta, senior advocacy, communications and campaigns manager for the international development and humanitarian aid organisation Save the Children in Malawi. 

Chipeta said the cyclone hadn’t just affected the hotspot areas for annual flooding, particularly low-lying areas, but had “affected even Blantyre city in the southern part of Malawi; normally [that area] doesn’t experience that level of destruction and disaster”.

On Monday, 13 March, the Malawian government reported that Blantyre city and district had more than 1,600 people displaced, 98 dead and 134 missing.

Chipeta said they had to evacuate people from mudslides where houses had been built in mountainous areas.

Engelbrecht said that some of the houses in Blantyre are built from mud, which caused the houses to collapse when hit with extreme rainfall — similar to what occurred with the fatal KwaZuluNatal mudslides last year.

“It’s a new phenomenon in this disaster,” said Chipeta. “We haven’t had this in a long time.”

Engelbrecht said that Freddy developed a “sequence that has never been before”.

He said that the cyclone making landfall in Madagascar, moving to the Mozambique Channel, and making landfall in Mozambique was not uncommon, but what was strange was that the cyclone moved back into the Mozambique Channel — usually, cyclones in the area keep going westwards and peter out.

Scientists are not sure why this happened, but Engelbrecht says Freddy was a very slow-moving cyclone and never completely lost touch with the ocean.

“So, over the warm waters it started to regenerate itself,” said Engelbrecht.

“Once again, the climate system has surprised us. The question we, as climatologists, need to pose is whether these higher sea surface temperatures in the southwest Indian Ocean, including in the Mozambique Channel, are now enabling generally longer lifetime for tropical cyclones.”