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Background
On the evening of Thursday 14 March Category 3 Tropical Cyclone Idai made landfall in Beira, Mozambique’s fourth largest city, bringing high wind speeds of up to 224 km per hour and heavy rains. The cyclone followed extensive flooding throughout the Mozambique provinces of Zambézia, Tete and Niassa in early March that caused significant infrastructure damage, interrupting regular supply routes. According to OCHA an estimate of 1.85 million persons need humanitarian assistance and more that 50 locations remains hard to reach in Nhamatanda, Buzi and Chibabava district.
The National Disaster Management Agency (INGC) is leading the response. The Logistics Cluster was activated on 20 March.
WFP, as lead agency of the Logistics Cluster, has been requested by the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) to provide coordination and information management support, and facilitate access of common logistics services to assist the humanitarian community in their efforts to deliver life-saving items across affected areas.
Logistics Gaps and Bottlenecks
The cyclone has seriously damaged logistics infrastructures across the affected areas including warehouses, roads and bridges.
Despite significative improvements in accessibility, many of the damaged infrastructures that were identified continue to require repair. While Buzi City is now accessible to light vehicle and trucks up to 20 mt, south Buzi remains extremely difficult to access by road, boats and helicopters are still the main delivery modalities to reach this location. In Muanza, the road from Dondo to Caia remains very difficult to access and the broken Nhamatanda bridge significantly affects the passage of trucks from Tica to Inchope. In Mossurize, the N260 road is still impossible to pass, despite ongoing reparation efforts.
One month after the cyclone, the current logistics bottlenecks are as follow:
- Air transport to hard to reach locations
- Road transport for roads difficult to pass
- Temporary storage support in the main humanitarian hubs