At least 4,000 people died in a tsunami-sized flash flood in eastern Libya on Sunday (September 10). However, according to the head of the World Meteorological Organization, which depends on the UN, this country ravaged by a serious political crisis could have avoided numerous losses with better coordination. “They could have issued warnings and the emergency management services could have evacuated people, and we could have avoided most of the human losses,” said Petteri Taalas, during a press briefing in Geneva .
Rising waters destroyed two dams upstream of the town of Derna, with entire blocks of houses washed away. According to Petteri Taalas, the disorganization affecting Libya – including its meteorological services – largely contributed to the scale of the disaster.
He noted that the years of internal conflict ravaging the country have “largely destroyed the weather observation network,” as have the computer systems. “The floods occurred and no evacuations took place because the proper early warning systems were not in place,” he said. If evacuations had taken place, the human toll would have been much lower, he added. In fact, a curfew had been declared in several towns in the east of the country, including Derna, forcing residents to stay at home.
“Of course, we cannot completely avoid economic losses, but we could also have minimized these losses by implementing appropriate services,” he said.
Libya’s National Meteorological Center (NMC) issued early warnings of severe weather conditions 72 hours in advance and informed government authorities by email, urging them to take preventive measures. A state of emergency was declared by authorities in eastern Libya on Friday and they set up a crisis unit. But according to the WMO regional office in Bahrain, the problem is that emergency management in Libya “no longer works” and there are “no means to manage such an unprecedented situation.”
Petteri Taalas warned that other countries are facing similar problems due to war. This is the case in Sudan, where the army and paramilitaries have been engaged in violent fighting for five months. Thus, the head of the country’s meteorological service told the head of the WMO that most of the staff “had fled Khartoum and were no longer able to predict these kinds of high-impact weather events.”
Petteri Taalas also spoke about the situation in Ukraine, a year and a half after the start of the Russian invasion. “According to our information, about a third of the weather stations have been destroyed and they are no longer able to operate their systems 24/7,” he said. The Ukrainians “can only access about 20 percent of the data they had before the war,” he added.
