International aid to Libya is intensifying on Thursday after the devastating floods which left thousands dead and missing in Derna in the east of the country, where the search for possible survivors continues.
Access to the disaster area, however, remains very difficult after the destruction of roads and bridges, as well as the damage caused to power and telephone lines cut in large areas, where at least 30,000 people were left homeless.
Several trucks loaded with food products managed to enter the city where the aid goes directly to collection centers, before being distributed to residents, according to an AFP journalist on site.
The surge of water overnight from Sunday to Monday in Derna broke two dams upstream, causing a flash flood of the magnitude of a tsunami.
“I have lost friends, loved ones. They are either buried under the mud or swept away by the waves towards the sea,” Abdelaziz Bousmya, 29, told AFP, his voice choked with emotion.
He said at least 10 percent of the city’s population perished.
The damage is enormous in this coastal city of 100,000 inhabitants where entire blocks of houses, cars and countless people were swept into the Mediterranean Sea.
Uncertainties remain about the death toll. The assessments put forward by the Libyan authorities vary from one official to another.
If the spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior within the Eastern government reported on Wednesday more than 3,840 deaths, the minister himself, Issam Bouznigua, spoke a few hours later of 2,794 deaths in Derna and in other Eastern cities.
Hundreds of bodies have already been buried since the disaster, sometimes in mass graves. At the same time, dozens of people who were trapped in the rubble of their homes were rescued, according to Libyan media.
On Thursday, traumatized residents, divers, rescuers and volunteers continued to remove bodies from flooded buildings or fish them out of the sea.
While pumping water into a damaged house, rescuers made a macabre discovery: a woman and her child whom she was holding in her arms were lying lifeless in a room, according to the AFP journalist.
Not far from there, a military official ordered body bags to be sent to a nearby town where around fifty bodies had washed up on the coast.
On a Facebook page entitled “the missing of Derna”, we can see, 24 hours after its creation, dozens of publications presenting names and photos of missing children or adults.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced Thursday that it had dispatched additional teams to the region for the distribution of humanitarian aid, adding that it had “provided 6,000 body bags”.
For its part, the World Food Program (WFP) indicated on Thursday that it had started providing food aid to more than 5,000 families displaced by floods, specifying that “thousands of families in Derna are now without food or shelter”.
The United Nations, the United States, the European Union and many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have promised to send aid. Foreign rescue teams are already at work looking for possible survivors or victims.
Moreover, this North African country has been plunged into chaos since the death of dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, with two rival governments, one recognized by the UN based in the capital Tripoli, in the west, ‘other in the eastern region affected by flooding.
One survivor told how he and his mother survived. “Within seconds, the water level suddenly rose.”
“The waves carried us away (…) before throwing us onto a staircase of an empty building,” he said on his hospital bed, according to testimony published by the Benghazi Medical Center (East). ).
“We went up the stairs and the water rose with us until we reached the fourth floor (…). From the window I saw cars and bodies carried away by the water,” he said. he added.
Most of the deaths “could have been avoided”, said Petteri Taalas, head of the World Meteorological Organization which depends on the UN, on Thursday. The years of conflict in Libya have “largely destroyed the weather observation network”, as have the computer systems, he said in Geneva.
Storm Daniel, which caused the floods, gained strength during an exceptionally hot summer and hit Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece, before reaching Libya on Sunday.
14/09/2023 21:16:05 – Derna (Libye) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
