Cyclone hits Mozambique port city

The coastal city of Beira in Mozambique, which houses one of the country’s most important ports, has seen mild damage to property and flooding after tropical cyclone Eloise made landfall early on Saturday, an official said in a TV report. The cyclone has since lost its strength and has been downgraded to a tropical storm, according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). “Beira had mild damage, but is too early to quantify the extent and scale of destruction,” Luisa Meque, President of Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Management and Reduction (INGD), said in a television interview with national broadcaster TVM. The South African weather department said Eloise made landfall around 2:30 a.m. in the morning with wind speeds of 160 kilometres per hour. Cars were submerged in water, walls of some low lying buildings collapsed and swathes of land were flooded in Beira, posts on Twitter showed. Beira was the epicentre of damage from cyclone Idai in March 2019, which ravaged the country’s second biggest city and killed more than 1,000 people across Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Mozambique National Institute of Meteorology (INAM) said Sofala province, which includes Beira, had seen 200 mm (8 inches) of rainfall and was likely to see another 100 mm of rain over the next 24 hours, the television channel reported. — Reuters