Tropical cyclone smashes into French Indian Ocean island, bringing 100-mile-an-hour winds

Tropical cyclone Garance made landfall on the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion on Friday, packing gusts of 166 kilometers (103 miles) per hour.

Garance – the equivalent of a Category 2 Atlantic hurricane – made landfall on the northern coast of the mountainous island, France’s meteorological agency said.

Garance is the strongest storm to hit the territory, located about 400 miles off the coast of Madagascar, since Tropical Cyclone Firinga in January 1989.

Authorities issued a purple cyclone warning, their highest level, for the entirety of the island as the storm is packing a punch and bringing heavy rainfall, gusty winds and powerful waves to the territory. That was later lowered to a red warning.

Winds could gust over 200 kilometers (124 miles) per hour and rainfall totals could exceed 200 mm (7.8 inches).

Conditions are expected to remain dangerous through Friday and will begin to improve Saturday.

Réunion lies about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) to the southeast of Mayotte, another French territory off the east coast of Africa, which suffered destruction likened to an atomic bomb after Cyclone Chido ripped through the archipelago in December, flattening entire neighborhoods and killing at least 31 people.

The government of French President Emmanuel Macron came under heavy fire for its handling of the cyclone – the strongest storm to hit the area in more than 90 years.

Macron faced jeers from locals as he visited the poverty-stricken territory in the storm’s aftermath, but told them they should be “happy to be in France, because if it wasn’t France you’d be 10,000 times even more in the s***.”

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