Cyclone Freddy shattered records. People lost everything. How does the healing begin?
Cyclone Freddy, which battered southeast Africa over the past month, broke all kinds of meteorological records. The U.N.'s weather agency is currently accessing whether it is longest cyclone ever recorded – lasting at least 36 days. And it's already broken the record for all-time accumulated cyclone energy in the Southern Hemisphere, a measure of the storm's strength over time, beating the previous record set by Cyclone Fantala in 2016.
The cyclone is also unusual for its looping trajectory, how far it traveled – almost 5,000 miles – as well as how often it dissipated and then re-strengthened.
It formed off the coast of Australia in early February and then crossed the Southern Indian Ocean, making landfall on the island of Madagascar before moving west into Mozambique in late February. It then did a loop, pummeling Mozambique again last weekend and then lashing Malawi, which has declared a state of disaster. It has already killed more than 400 in total and displaced
