Death toll from cyclone surpasses 500 in southern Africa

A week after Cyclone Idai lashed southern Africa, flooding still raged Thursday as torrential rains caused a dam to overflow in Zimbabwe, threatening riverside populations. The confirmed death toll in Zimbabwe, neighboring Mozambique and Malawi surpassed 500, with hundreds more feared dead in towns and villages that were completely submerged.

Aid agencies and several governments continued to step up their deployments, with helicopters in short supply for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the cyclone.

Spokesman Herve Verhoosel of the World Food Program told reporters in Geneva of the "alarming news" that the Marowanyati dam in Zimbabwe was hit by heavy rains overnight, putting populations in the region at risk.

Zimbabwe's defense minister said more than 120 bodies had been washed into neighboring Mozambique, where residents there buried them, and more bodies were still being recovered in rivers, raising the official death toll in the country to 259.

"Most of the bodies were washed into Mozambique and because they were in a really bad state, they could not keep the bodies," Defense Minister Oppah Muchinguri said, speaking in the eastern city of Mutare. "So they ended up burying them."