Tropical Storm Freddy was on track to batter the southern African coast again early Saturday after killing at least 27 people in Mozambique and Madagascar since it first made landfall last month.
One of the strongest storms ever recorded in the southern hemisphere, Freddy may also have broken the record for the longest-lasting tropical cyclone, according to the World Meteorological Organization, which said the current record is held by a 31-day hurricane in 1994.
Freddy was named on February 6, 33 days ago.
More than 171,000 people were affected when the cyclone hit southern Mozambique two weeks ago, bringing heavy rains and flooding that damaged crops and destroyed houses, according to the UN humanitarian agency OCHA.
OCHA on Friday put Freddy’s latest death toll at 27, with 10 in Mozambique and 17 in Madagascar.
Some 565,000 people could be at risk in Mozambique this time in the provinces of Zambezia, Tete, Sofala and Nampula, with Zambezia expected to be the worst affected, according to the country’s national disaster management agency.
Its central region director, Nelson Ludovico, said the agency was preparing for the storm’s arrival early Saturday and had moved people into makeshift shelters.
“It is a cyclone that moves slowly. This is bad news in terms of rainfall because it means it is floating very close to shore and it is collecting more moisture, so the rain will be heavier,” said Clare Nullis, a spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization. she told reporters in Geneva.
The storm is likely to bring extreme rainfall to much of Mozambique, as well as northeastern Zimbabwe, southeastern Zambia and Malawi, it said.
Around the world, climate change is making hurricanes wetter, windier and more intense, scientists say. The oceans absorb much of the heat from greenhouse gas emissions, and when warm seawater evaporates, its heat energy is transferred to the atmosphere, creating stronger storms.
Freddy has set a record for the highest cumulative cyclone energy, a measure of storm strength over time, of any Southern Hemisphere storm in history, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The storm has generated as much pent-up cyclonic energy on its own as an average North Atlantic hurricane season, Nullis said.
“World record or not, Freddy will in any case remain an exceptional phenomenon for the history of the southwestern Indian Ocean in many respects: longevity, distance travelled, notable peak intensity, amount of accumulated cyclonic energy, [and] impact on inhabited lands,” Sebastien Langlade, cyclone forecaster at the Regional Specialized Meteorological Center in La Réunion, said in a WMO statement.
