Back in mid-March, I wrote a piece for Forbes urging people to pay attention to Tropical Cyclone Idai. It was bearing down on extremely vulnerable populations in parts of African. I wrote at that time,
the population of Mozambique is concentrated at the coasts as is much of its economic activity...Exposure to a potential category 2 or 3 level tropical cyclone making landfall on Thursday creates elevated vulnerability because of increased sensitivity (people and infrastructure) and low adaptive capacity. More than 80 percent of the population of Mozambique lives on less than two dollars per day.
According to WorldVision.org, Idai was one of the strongest cyclones on record in the Southern Hemisphere. Nearly 3 million people experienced flooding in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. At last count, the death toll exceeded 800 people and is likely to rise significant. The same region is now facing Cyclone Kenneth. Will the global community pay attention this time?
Professor Greg Jenkins of Pennsylvania State University is an expert on African weather and climate. His social media post says it all, "Round Two." As of April 24, Kenneth was northeast of Madagascar. As the storm moves through the Mozambique Channel towards the coast of Mozambique, here are the latest details from a NASA blog:
On April 24 at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) Tropical cyclone Kenneth was located near 10.9 degrees south latitude and 45.7 east longitude. That is 148 nautical miles east-northeast of Comoros Island. Kenneth was moving to the west. Maximum sustained winds had increased to 70 knots (80 mph/130 kph) making Kenneth hurricane-strength.
Where is Kenneth expected to go? The answer to this question is worrisome because it seems to be headed to the same region of Africa still recovering from Idai. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center is a United States Department of Defense unit responsible for tropical cyclone forecasts in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, respectively. Their forecasters expect the storm to move west then more west-southwest and strengthen to 121 mph winds before making landfall in northern Mozambique, according to NASA. On the Saffir-Simpson scale, such winds would make Kenneth a category 3 or "major" storm. Corene Matyas is a tropical weather expert and geographer at the University of Florida. She says these storms are somewhat rare in this geographical region. Stephen Leahy wrote in National Geographic after Cyclone Idai, "Mozambique averages about 1.5 tropical cyclones a year and, although rarely more powerful than Category 2, they can cause a lot of damage, said Corene Matyas."
This means that a category 3 storm is bearing down on a region that just took multiple hits from winds and flooding associated with Idai. To give you some perspective on just how bad things already are in Mozambique, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) described the damage from Idai in the days after the storm this way:
The scale of damage caused in Beira, Mozambique's fourth largest city, is described as "massive and horrifying." A team from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) aid workers that reached the devastated city on Sunday, said that it seemed that 90 percent of the area is completely destroyed. The National Disaster Management Institute (INGC) estimates that 600,000 people are currently at risk and in urgent need of humanitarian assistance in the affected areas.
The President of Zimbabwe also declared a state of disaster.
I urge the U.S. and global community to focus on this region. I cannot help but think about the devastation caused by hurricanes like Harvey and Maria. It is very difficult to imagine Houston and Puerto Rico in recovery mode and then having to face a category 3 hurricane four weeks later. This is exactly what parts of Africa face in the next few days with far less wealth and adaptive capacity than the U.S.
