Mayotte: soon prefabricated housing to replace the precarious housing destroyed by Chido

The government will launch a call for projects to design prefabricated housing in Mayotte, where almost all precarious housing was destroyed by Cyclone Chido.

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Mayotte is still healing its wounds after the devastating passage of Cyclone ChidoSaturday December 14, but the question of rebuilding housing in this small, very poor French archipelago in the Indian Ocean is already being raised. In fact, a third of the Mahorais population lives in precarious housing, which has been destroyed “almost in full» by the cyclone, “particularly in the north of the island”indicates the Ministry of Housing. Adding that “more durable housing had their roofs torn off”. According to the latest data from the French National Institute of Statistics and Studies, which dates from 2017, four out of ten homes are made of sheet metal in Mayotte, and three out of ten do not have running water.

Questioned by MP Gérald Darmanin (Together for the Republic), former Minister of the Interior, during questions to the government this Tuesday, December 17, the new Prime Minister François Bayrou agreed that the “question of thereconstruction is essential for the inhabitants of Mayotte because it is in it that they base their hopes”. Michel Barnier’s successor thus announced the upcoming launch, by the government, of a “call for projects relating to the design of prefabricated housingquick to assemble and not too expensive”. François Bayrou said to himself “convinced that a large number of companies, even architecture schools, will be passionate about this call for projects”. The subject will in any case be discussed internally, Wednesday December 18, at Toits Temporaires Urbains, indicates to Capital its president, Christophe Caresche. This subsidiary of Caisse des Dépôts and SNCF must, for example, deliver next summer a temporary accommodation center in Stains, in Seine-Saint-Denis, built with 94 wooden modules. “We are already working on a subject in Guyana with two objectives that we could develop in Mayotte: adapt our construction system to the local context, that is to say humidity and wind, and produce it locally”adds Christophe Caresche.

It’s time to clean up in Mayotte

The French Building Federation, which participated on December 16 in an interministerial meeting to draw up “an inventory” of the situation in Mayotte, had not yet reacted to François Bayrou’s announcement at the time of publishing these lines. But in the morning, during its quarterly economic update, its president, Olivier Salleron, stressed that the time had come to “clearingto try to find survivors”the Prime Minister having reported a provisional toll of around twenty deaths. “All the (construction) machines having not been destroyed, we are clearing the means of communication and the roads”added the president of the FFB.