NEW DELHI, Sept 12: Emergency workers uncovered hundreds of bodies as they dug through the wreckage of Libya’s eastern city of Derna on Tuesday with at least 700 killed and over 10,000 people were reported still missing after floodwaters broke through dams and smashed through the city, washing away entire neighbourhood.
At least 700 recovered bodies have been buried so far, the Health Minister for eastern Libya said. Derna’s ambulance authority put the current death toll at 2,300.
Officials in Libya have said at least 150 people were killed in the flooding in Libya after storm Daniel swept the Mediterranean, lashing Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece. But Tamer Ramadan of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the actual toll was likely many times higher.
“Our teams on the ground are still doing their assessment, (but) from what we see and from the news coming to us, the death count is huge,” he told reporters in Geneva via video link from Tunis. “It might reach to the thousands.”
The destruction came to Derna and other parts of eastern Libya on September 10 night, when Mediterranean storm Daniel pounded the coast. Residents said they heard loud explosions and realised that dams outside the city had collapsed, unleashing flash floods down Wadi Derna, a river running from the mountains through the city and into the sea.
The wall of water sweeping through Derna “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 the residential neighbourhood on both banks of the river. Multi-storey apartment buildings that once were well back from the river had facades ripped away and concrete floors collapsed. Cars lifted by the water were left dumped on top of each other.
Residents in the city of some 90,000 were on their own in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. On Tuesday, local emergency responders, including troops, government workers, volunteers and residents were digging through rubble to recover the dead. They also used inflatable boats to retrieve bodies from the water.
Footage showed dozens of bodies covered by blankets laid out in the yard of a hospital in Derna. Many bodies were believed trapped under rubble or had been 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,” Mr Abduljaleel said. Red Crescent teams from other parts of Libya also arrived in Derna but extra excavators and other equipment had yet to get there, hampered in part by cut-off and destroyed roads.
Authorities said two dams on Wadi Derna had collapsed, underscoring the weakness of Libya’s infrastructure after more than a decade of chaos. The oil-rich nation remains divided between two rival administrations: one in the east and one in the west, each backed by different militias and foreign governments. Derna is controlled by the forces of military commander Khalifa Hifter, the strongman of the east Libya government, based in Benghazi.
The storm hit other areas in eastern Libya, including the town of Bayda, where about 50 people were reported dead. The Medical Centre of Bayda, the main hospital, was flooded and patients had to be evacuated, social media reports showed. Other towns that suffered, included Susa, Marj and Shahatt, according to the government. Hundreds of families were displaced and took shelter in schools and other government buildings in the city of Benghazi and elsewhere in eastern Libya.
(Manas Dasgupta)