We spent the morning skirting this bruiser of a storm. Tropical storm Jokwe was doing it’s best to keep us from reaching Nampula. Dave LePoidevin our MAF pilot did a great job of safely navigating us in.
This is what the storm looked like at 5:00 am:
That big patch of white in the upper right is the storm sitting right in between the island of Madagascar and the Mozambique coastline.
Our view of Jokwe in our little Cessna looked something like this:
We spent almost four hours looking at this ugly beast and I needed to pee the whole trip. Coffee or nerves?
Click on the satellite photo to see what the storm looks like at this point. And say a prayer for the Mozambican people especially on the coast who will be hiding from this storm in huts with grass roofs.
Note: If you haven’t been following these posts over the last couple of days, I’m on a trip from Tete to Beira to Nampula and back. Hilary is home with the kids and her Mom.
I just heard from our colleague in Angoche on the coast that the storm has ripped tiles off their roof. You can only imagine what shape people’s houses are in.
Carlos Serra is blogging in Portuguese about the storm. Poor boy is using Blogger so he’s having some trouble posting to his blog…
According to Carlos, dozens of houses, schools, mosques and power poles have been destroyed.
The latest news is that in the district of Mossuril there were more than 230 houses destroyed as well as fifteen schools. I’m sure quite a lot of damage assessment will happen today.
It’s very strange that this hasn’t been covered at all by BBC or any other news source I can find on the web.