Thousands of people died and at least 10,000 are missing as devastating floods caused by Storm Daniel devastated eastern Libya.
Tens of thousands have been displaced.
The worst floods in the last four decades in the country have left cities completely isolated, dams and bridges washed away, and a trail of death in their wake.
According to emergency services in the area, at least 2,300 people have died. Alone in the city of Derna More than a thousand bodies have been recovered. Other sources offer much higher figures.
“There are bodies everywhere: in the sea, in the valleys, under buildings,” Hichem Chkiouat, civil aviation minister and member of the eastern emergency committee, told Reuters.
Many of the buildings in Derna, a city of 125,000 inhabitants, have collapsed, said Chkiouat, who said that “I am not exaggerating if I say that 25% of the city has disappeared.”
“We can confirm from our independent information sources that the number of missing people reaches 10,000 for now,” said Tamer Ramadan, head of the Libyan delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). acronym in English).
For his part, the director for Libya of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Dax Bennett Roque, indicated that the rescue team on the ground had told him “tens of thousands of people had been displaced with no prospect of returning to their homes”.
Since the rebellion that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has been de facto divided in two, with two governments facing each other: an internationally recognized interim executive in Tripoli, in the west of the country, and another that governs the eastern part of this Mediterranean country, under the influence of the powerful general Khalifa Haftar, where the tragedy occurred.
This makes rescue efforts and knowing the real number of victims difficult.
Rescuer Kasim Al-Qatani told the BBC that there is no drinking water in Derna and medical supplies are lacking.
He added that Derna’s only hospital could no longer receive patients because “there are more than 700 bodies waiting in the hospital and it is not that big.”
The heavy rains that occurred on Sunday caused the collapse of two dams on the Derna River“which dragged entire neighborhoods with their residents into the sea,” said Ahmed Mismari, spokesman for the Libyan National Army, which controls the east of the country, in a televised press conference.
In addition to Derna, which has been razed, the cities of Benghazi, Susa and Al Marj, all in the east, as well as Misrata, in the west, have also been affected.
“It was like a tsunami,” Chkiouat described to the BBC. “A huge neighborhood has been destroyed, there is a large number of victims, which increases with each hour,” said the minister, who acknowledged that one of the dams that burst had not received maintenance for some time.
Hydraulic engineering experts told the BBC that It is likely that the upper dam, about 12 kilometers from the city, failed first and its water swept across the river valley towards the second dam, located closer to Derna, where entire neighborhoods were flooded.
The differences have been temporarily put aside and the Tripoli government today sent a plane with 14 tons of medical supplies, body bags and some 80 doctors and paramedics.
According to Libyan journalist Abdulkader Assad, this hinders rescue effortssince the different administrations do not have the capacity to respond quickly to a natural disaster.
“There are no rescue teams, there are no trained rescuers in Libya. “Everything in the last 12 years has revolved around war,” he told the BBC.
“There are two governments in Libya… and this is slowing down the aid coming to Libya because everything is confusing. There are people who promise help, but the help does not arrive,” says Assad.
The United Nations and several countries offered to send aid, including Algeria, Egypt, France, Italy, Qatar and Tunisia.
Rescue teams from Turkey have arrived in eastern Libya, according to authorities, and France is sending a field hospital and staff capable of caring for 500 people a day.
Storm Daniel brewed a week ago over Greece, on the other side of the Mediterranean. High sea surface temperatures, higher than usual for these dates, provided moisture and power to the storm.
In the 24 hours between 08:00 on Sunday and 08:00 on Monday, the Omar Al Mukhtar University of Al Baida recorded 414 mm of rain.
To put this figure in perspective, the annual rainfall for the city of Benghazi is typically 270 mm.
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See original article on BBC