A view of Susah, Libya, in the aftermath of the floods on September 15, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Libyan authorities sealed off an inundated city on Friday to allow search teams to dig through the mud and hollowed-out buildings for 10,000 people missing and feared dead after the official toll from flooding soared past 11,000. Authorities warned that disease and explosives shifted by the waters could take yet more lives.

Two dams collapsed in exceptionally heavy rains from Mediterranean storm Daniel early Monday, sending a wall of water several meters high gushing down a valley that cuts through the city of Derna.

The unusual flooding and Libya’s political chaos contributed to the enormous toll. The oil-rich state has been split since 2014 between rival governments in the east and west backed by various militia forces and international patrons.

The disaster has brought rare unity, as government agencies across Libya’s divide rushed to help the affected areas. But relief efforts have been slowed by the destruction after several bridges that connect the city were destroyed.

Heaps of twisted metal and flooded cars littered Derna’s streets, which are caked in a tan mud. Teams have buried bodies in mass graves outside the city and in nearby towns, Eastern Libya’s health minister, Othman Abduljaleel, said.

But officials worried that thousands of bodies were still hidden in the muck — or floating in the sea, where divers were sent to search.

Adel Ayad, a survivor of the flood, recalled watching as the waters rose to the fourth floor of his building.

“The waves swept people away from the tops of buildings, and we could see people carried by floodwater,” among them his neighbors, he said.

Health officials warned that standing water opened the door to disease — but said there was no need to rush burials or put the dead in mass graves, as bodies usually do not pose a risk in such cases.

“You’ve got a lot of standing water. It doesn’t mean the dead bodies pose a risk, but it does mean that the water itself is contaminated by everything,” Dr. Margaret Harris, spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, told reporters in Geneva. “So you really have to focus on ensuring that people have have access to safe water.”

Imene Trabelsi, a spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross, warned that another danger lurked in the mud: landmines and other explosive remnants left behind by the country’s protracted conflict.

There are leftover explosives in Libya dating back to World War II, but most of the remaining ones are from the civil conflict that began in 2011. Between 2011 and 2021, some 3,457 people were killed and wounded by landmines and explosive weapon remnants in Libya, according to the international Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor.

Even before the flooding, Trabelsi said the “efforts and the capacity” to detect and demine areas were limited. After the floods, she said, explosive devices may have been swept to “new, undetected areas.”

To allow emergency crews to do their work, residents were being evacuated from Derna and only search-and-rescue teams would be allowed to enter, Salam al-Fergany, director general of the Ambulance and Emergency Service in eastern Libya, announced late Thursday.

The Libyan Red Crescent said as of Thursday that 11,300 people in Derna had died and another 10,100 were reported missing. The storm also killed about 170 people elsewhere in the country.

Officials have said that Libya’s political chaos has contributed to the loss of life.

“Government institutions are not functioning as they should,” Lori Hieber Girardet, the head of the risk knowledge branch the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Khalifa Othman, a Derna resident who is searching desperately for missing loved ones, said he blamed authorities for the extent of the disaster.

“My son, a doctor who is graduated this year, my nephew and all his family, my grandchild, my daughter and her husband are all missing, and we are still searching for them,” he said. “All the people are upset and angry — there was no preparedness.”

A view shows people inspecting the damaged areas, in the aftermath of the floods in Derna, Libya September 14, 2023.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The United Nations said Thursday that most of the thousands of deaths in Libya’s flood disaster could have been averted if early warning and emergency management systems had functioned properly.

With better functioning coordination in the crisis-wracked country, the human toll could have been far smaller, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said.

It warned that other conflict-hit countries faced similar, dangerous deficiencies to their early warning systems.

If the system in Libya ad worked properly, “the emergency management forces would have been able to carry out the evacuation of the people, and we could have avoided most of the human casualties,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas told reporters in Geneva.

His comments came after a tsunami-sized flash flood hit eastern Libya at the weekend, killing at least 4,000 people, with thousands more missing and feared dead.

The enormous surge of water burst two upstream river dams and reduced the city of Derna to an apocalyptic wasteland where entire city blocks and untold numbers of people were washed into the Mediterranean Sea.

Taalas said lacking weather forecasting and dissemination and action on early warnings was a large contributor to the size of the disaster.

The years-long internal conflict and political crisis wracking the country meant its meteorological “observing network has been very much destroyed, the IT systems have been destroyed”, he said.

“The flooding events came and there was no evacuation taking place, because there was not the proper early warning systems in place.”

Libya’s National Meteorological Centre (NMC) did issue early warnings for the extreme weather coming 72 hours in advance and had notified governmental authorities by email, urging them to take preventative measures.

But WMO said it was “not clear whether (the warnings) were effectively disseminated”.

While there had once been close cooperation between meteorological services and disaster management throughout Libya, this is no longer the case.

While no evacuation was ordered, a curfew was ordered in several eastern towns, including Derna, meaning most people were in their homes when the dams burst.

WMO’s regional office in Bahrain said “the problem was not in issuing the warning” in a timely manner, but the fact that “there was no capacity to handle such a situation”, especially as the failure of the two dams created an “unprecedented” situation.

“Disaster management has indeed broken down in Libya.”

Taalas warned that other conflict-hit countries are facing similar dangerous early warning deficiencies, including Sudan, ravaged by five months of fighting between the army and a paramilitary group.

He said the head of the country’s meteorological service had told him most of the staff “have escaped Khartoum and they are not able to forecast this kind of high-impact weather events anymore”.

He also highlighted the situation in Ukraine, a year and a half into Russia’s full-scale invasion.

“According to our information, about one third of the weather stations have been destroyed and they are not able to operate their systems at 24/7 anymore,” he said.

“The estimation is that they can only get access to about 20 percent of the data that they used to have before the war,” he said, adding that this could have a dangerous impact on the services.