After Cyclone Chidotore cut off large portions of the population in Mayotte, a French colony in the Indian Ocean, thousands were thought dead Monday.
Video taken on the archipelago, which is around 500 miles off southeast Africa, between Madagascar and Mozambique, showed wooden beams from destroyed structures scattered across the landscape, intertwined with fallen trees and corrugated metal and plastic.
The enormous, towering trunks of coconut trees sway against the gray sky as they bow under the wind gusts. From above, the scale of the damage is visible as a jumbled, multicolored blanket of strewn-about home and building rubble.
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