Around 2,000 people have died and thousands more are missing after Storm Daniel dumped so much rain on Libya’s northeast that two dams collapsed sending water flowing into already inundated areas.
Othman Abduljalil, health minister in Libya’s eastern parliament-backed government, toured the worst-hit city of Derna on Monday, describing parts of it as a “ghost town.”
“The situation [in Derna] was catastrophic… The bodies are still lying in many places,” Abduljalil told Libya’s Almasar TV.
“There are families still stuck inside their homes and there are victims under the rubble… I expect people have been washed away into the sea, and tomorrow (Tuesday) morning, we’ll find many of them,” he said.
As many as 6,000 people are missing from Derna, Abduljalil said, but it’s just one area affected by flooding that has swept across several cities in the country’s north-east bordering the Mediterranean Sea.
There are fears that aid efforts may be hampered by political fractures in the country, which has seen a years-long power struggle between two rival administrations – one in the east and one in the west.
The rain is the result of a very strong low-pressure system that brought catastrophic flooding to Greece last week and moved into the Mediterranean before developing into a tropical-like cyclone known as a medicane. The weather system is similar to tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic, or typhoons in the Pacific.
On Monday, Libya’s Red Crescent Society estimated that more than 300 people had died in Derna, according to a post on social media.
Ahmed Mismari, spokesperson for the eastern based Libyan National Army (LNA), said two dams had collapsed under the pressure of flooding.
“As a consequence, three bridges were destroyed. The flowing water carried away entire neighborhoods, eventually depositing them into the sea,” he said. The head of Libya’s Emergency and Ambulance authority, Osama Aly, told CNN that after the dam collapse “all of the water headed to an area near Derna, which is a mountainous coastal area.”
Homes in valleys were washed away by strong muddy currents carrying vehicles and debris, he added. Phone lines in the city are also down, complicating rescue efforts, Aly said, with workers unable to enter Derna due to the heavy destruction.
Aly said authorities didn’t anticipate the scale of the disaster.
“The weather conditions were not studied well, the seawater levels and rainfall [were not studied], the wind speeds, there was no evacuation of families that could be in the path of the storm and in valleys,” Aly said. “Libya was not prepared for a catastrophe like that. It has not witnessed that level of catastrophe before. We are admitting there were shortcomings even though this is the first time we face that level of catastrophe,” Aly told Al Hurra channel earlier.