Aid workers raced on Wednesday to help survivors and meet spiralling humanitarian needs in three southern African countries battered by the region's worst storm in years.
Five days after tropical cyclone Idai cut a swathe through Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, the confirmed death toll stood at more than 300 and hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk, officials said.
Mozambique, where the monster storm made landfall early last Friday, is reeling.
"We’ve thousands of people... in roofs and trees waiting for rescue," Caroline Haga, spokeswoman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said.
"We are running out of time. People have been waiting for rescue for more than three days now," said Haga from the storm-ravaged coastal city of Beira.
She added: "Unfortunately, we can’t pick up all the people, so our priority are children, pregnant women, injured people."
World Food Programme (WFP) spokeswoman Deborah Nguyen said that "the priority today is to rush to rescue people trapped in the flooded areas" as much as organising temporary shelter for those rescued.
"The situation has not really improved. In Buzi, the villages are still under water but the good news is that there are many rescue teams working all day long.
"Relief operations are progressing, but there is still a lot of work."
The UN is targeting to help some 600,000 people in coming weeks.
Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi said on Tuesday that 202 people had died, according to the latest toll, and nearly 350,000 people were at risk.
In Zimbabwe, the death toll stood at 100 on Wednesday but was expected to surge to 300, while up to 15,000 people are estimated to have been hit by the storm.
In Malawi, nearly a million people have been affected and more than 80,000 forced from their homes, according to the UN.
Aid agencies said they were prepared for the cyclone which made landfall early Friday, but not for the massive floods that followed.
Mozambique bore the brunt from rivers that flow downstream from its neighbours.
Beira airport which was partially damaged by the storm and temporarily shut, had reopened to become the relief operations hub but is proving not large enough.
Air force personnel from Mozambique and South Africa have been drafted in to fly rescue missions and distribute aid which can only be airlifted as roads out of Beira have been destroyed.
Climate expert John Mutter, a professor at the Earth Institute at New York's Columbia University, said the heavy toll was partly explained by the infrequency of such weather events in southern Africa.
"Mozambique and Zimbabwe are essentially unprepared. They both have weak governance that, honestly, focuses on many more pressing things (as they would see it). And because cyclones are so rare in this part of the world, so preparedness is minimal," said Mutter.
In Zimbabwe, at least 217 people are listed as missing in Chimanimani in Manicaland, an eastern province which borders Mozambique.
The district remains cut off after roads were swallowed by massive sinkholes and bridges were ripped to pieces by flash floods - a landscape that Defence Minister Perrance Shiri said "resembles the aftermath of a full-scale war".
After visiting some of the victims in Chimanimani, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa said "a tragedy has visited us".
"The last place we visited, where three main rivers merge, an entire village was washed away. I think those are the bodies which are now being found in Mozambique," he said.
The three countries are some of the poorest in the region and depend heavily on foreign aid.
