Thousands dead in flood-ravaged Libya
CAIRO — Emergency workers uncovered thousands of bodies in the wreckage of Libya’s eastern city of Derna on Tuesday, and it was feared the toll could spiral with 10,000 people reported still missing after floodwaters smashed through dams and washed away entire neighborhoods of the city.
The death toll in Derna alone has exceeded 5,300, the staterun news agency quoted Mohammed Abu-Lamousha, a spokesman for the east Libya interior ministry, as saying Tuesday.
The startling death and devastation wreaked by Mediterranean storm Daniel pointed to the storm’s intensity, but also the vulnerability of a nation torn apart by chaos for more than a decade. The country is divided by rival governments, and the result has been neglect of infrastructure in many areas.
Outside help was only just starting to reach Derna on Tuesday, more than 36 hours after the disaster struck. The floods damaged or destroyed many access roads to the coastal city of some 89,000.
Footage showed dozens of bodies covered by blankets in the yard of one hospital. Another image showed a mass grave piled with bodies. More than 1,500 corpses were collected, and half of them had been buried as of Tuesday evening, the health minister for eastern Libya said.
The death toll is likely to be in the thousands, said Tamer Ramadan, Libya envoy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. He told a U.N. briefing in Geneva via videoconference from Tunisia that at least 10,000 people were still missing. He said later Tuesday that more than 40,000 people have been displaced.
The situation in Libya is “as devastating as the situation in Morocco,” Ramadan said, referring to the deadly earthquake that hit near the city of Marrakesh on Friday night.
The destruction came to Derna and other parts of eastern Libya on Sunday night. As the storm pounded the coast, Derna residents said they heard loud explosions and realized that dams outside the city had collapsed. Flash floods were unleashed down Wadi Derna, a river running from the mountains through the city and into the sea.
The wall of water “erased everything in its way,” said one resident, Ahmed Abdalla.
Videos posted online by residents showed large swaths of mud and wreckage where the raging waters had swept away neighborhoods on both banks of the river. Multistory apartment buildings that once were well back from the river had facades ripped away and concrete floors collapsed. Cars lifted by the flood were left dumped on top of each other.
On Tuesday, local emergency responders, including troops, government workers, volunteers and residents, dug through rubble looking for the dead. They also used inflatable boats to retrieve bodies from the water.
Many bodies were believed trapped under rubble or washed out into the Mediterranean Sea, said eastern Libya’s health minister, Othman Abduljaleel.
“We were stunned by the amount of destruction … the tragedy is very significant, and beyond the capacity of Derna and the government,” Abduljaleel told the Associated Press on the phone from Derna.
Red Crescent teams from other parts of Libya also arrived in Derna on Tuesday morning, but extra excavators and other equipment had yet to get there.
Flooding often happens in Libya during rainy season but rarely with this much destruction. A key question was how the rains were able to burst through two dams outside Derna — whether because of poor maintenance or sheer volume of rain.
Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist and meteorologist at Leipzig University, said in a statement that Daniel dumped 15.7 inches of rain on eastern Libya in a short time.
“The infrastructure could probably not cope, leading to the collapse of the dam,” he said.
The Tripoli-based government of western Libya sent 14 tons of medical supplies and health workers to Benghazi, and had allocated the equivalent of $412 million for reconstruction. Other aid arrived Tuesday from Egypt, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.