Cyclone Freddy was the longest-lasting and most powerful tropical cyclone ever recorded. It killed at least 1,434 people and caused an estimated $481 million in damage.
Freddy developed south of the Indonesian archipelago as a tropical low. It travelled across the Indian ocean, intensifying into a Category 4 severe tropical cyclone, and made landfall in Madagascar and later in Mozambique. At its peak Feddy generated wind speeds of 270 kilometres an hour.
Malawi suffered most from Cyclone Freddy. Incessant rain caused catastrophic flash floods, especially in Blantyre, a city with a population of nearly one million people. The country’s power grid was crippled and debris made Malawi’s hydroelectric power plant inoperable.
Around 500,000 Malawians were affected by the cyclone with 180,000 forced to leave their homes as six months of rain fell in six days. Fields were flooded and crops were destroyed. Around 300,000 livestock were killed or injured. Landslides blocked roads and nine bridges were washed away.
President Lazarus Chakwera declared a state of disaster in the southern regions.
Problems experienced in the aftermath of Cyclone Freddy included an enhanced risk of cholera, food price increases and food shortages, an increase in gender-based violence, and deteriorating mental health among both Malawians and frontline aid workers.
Gladys Austin’s home in Makwalo village, Nsange district was flooded by Cyclone Freddy. She told the Guardian newspaper that the fields on which she and her husband grew maize, beans and tomatoes were destroyed, and so were the sandbars on the Ruo River where they used to fish.
Their goats, ducks and chickens were washed away together with the bags of grain which they had accumulated over the years. They lost everything they owned including their home, property worth $3,400 in all.
The village chief ordered everyone to evacuate, and most of the villagers went to stay with relatives or friends. But Austin and her husband squatted in their flooded home for three months until at last they moved to the Namiyala refugee camp about six miles away. Their attachment to their land had made it hard for them to move.
Austin and her family stayed at the refugee camp for two months along with more than 10,000 other displaced people before moving to a plastic-covered shack.
Then they found themselves among some 600 Nsange households who became the first climate survivors in the world to receive loss and damage funds via cash transfers. This is an important development which may well be repeated in other disaster situations.