Africa-Press – Mozambique. Coastal districts of Nampula province in northern Mozambique have been unreachable since this morning, when Cyclone Gombe made landfall there, a civil protection source told Lusa today.
“The districts were uncontactable,” an official from the National Emergency Operative Centre (Cenoe) said, adding that teams in the region could not proceed to the site because of the dangerous conditions.
“The phenomenon continues to plague the districts. There is no electricity or telephone communications, which makes it difficult to obtain information about the real impact” of the cyclone, he added.
Teams from the National Institute of Disaster Management (INGD) are ready to await “guidance from the National Institute of Meteorology (INAM) that they can go into the field.
Cyclone Gombe reached the Mozambican coast at 03:00 a.m. (01:00 a.m. Lisbon time) as an intense cyclone with torrential rain and winds of up to 165 kilometres per hour, gusting to more than 200 kilometres per hour, the French meteorological centre on the island of Reunion reported.
The Reunion centre, which monitors cyclones in the southwest of the Indian Ocean, indicates that Cyclone Gombe made landfall in Nampula, the country’s most populous province, between the villages of Mogincual and Terrene, 50 kilometres south of Mozambique Island.
A fifth of Mozambique’s approximately 30 million citizens live in Nampula.
The area continues to experience cyclonic rain and winds as the storm advances towards Nampula, the provincial capital, 150 kilometres inland, where weather conditions have been deteriorating since dawn, residents told Lusa.
Gombe hits Mozambique two years after Cyclones Idai and Kenneth hit the centre and north of the country, respectively, in one of the most severe rainy seasons in memory.
