On the east coast of Libya, twelve days after the passage of storm Daniel, localities follow one another and, with them, landscapes of desolation: collapsed roads, houses gutted by trees, decimated herds, engulfed fields…
In the past, Soussa, located about sixty kilometers west of Derna, the most affected town with thousands of dead and missing, was known for its houses overlooking the Mediterranean, rented to passing visitors.
On the evening of September 10, torrents of water fell on them, with incredible power, from the top of the overhanging mountain. Today, only a few houses filled with mud stand tottering amid the rubble.
In other neighborhoods that are more spared, but where public services have been failing for a long time, the taps are dry and the electricity has only recently returned.
“Water is a real problem,” one of the residents, Ahmed Saleh, aged 34, told AFP. While waiting for the power plant at the entrance to the town to resume service, volunteers “bring us water in tanks from neighboring towns,” he says.
The desalination plant, which supplies 320,000 people in the region, is still at a standstill while its employees are busy removing pipes, tanks and other equipment from the sticky mud that covers them.
Milad Saleh, 63, 34 of whom work in water treatment, remembers the first day after the floods: “the pipes were blocked by wood, stones and mud.”
For the site’s administrative director, Ezz El Guedri, “it will take a week, maybe ten days to restart the machines.”
While in Soussa, we wait for water on the imposing ancient Greek site of Cyrene, we could do without the bubbling water with its nauseating odor which comes out of the ground at the foot of the columns of the temples and pollutes the Fountain of ‘Apollo.
On this site, classified since 2016 by UNESCO as a world heritage site in danger, the water should be quickly evacuated and the monuments consolidated, according to archaeologists.
In Marawa, further west, in Jabal al-Akhdar, the most humid and fertile area of ??the country, agricultural machinery will not be restarted soon.
“When we were supposed to start harvesting and selling, we lost everything,” Salem Fadhel, 29, told AFP. “All the crops have been covered, around sixty farms have been devastated,” he continues, in the middle of a field of lettuce whose heads barely emerge from the red mud in the middle of torn irrigation pipes.
Some were deprived of their onion plants “which they sold as far as Tripoli”, the capital located in the West, as well as their tomatoes, potatoes, fruits and cereals.
“It’s a disaster, people had thrown out all the season’s expenses and now they have nothing left,” he laments, while behind him, a gaping hole opens up instead. of a road which collapsed, killing a resident.
If he did not survive, it is “because the roads are out of use” after the storm, but also because there were no vehicles and rescue teams needed in Marawa, believes -he.
Rujab Abdelmollah al-Barassi has long called for better medical services. “The authorities made us lots of promises even before the disaster but nothing has changed in Marawa,” he accuses.
At the headquarters of the Red Crescent, in Benghazi, the large eastern city where an authority affiliated with the camp of powerful Marshal Khalifa Haftar is based, the observation is the same.
“We do not have the rescue equipment or the necessary vehicles, we need support from the whole world, we cannot manage this crisis alone and it will last a long time,” assures AFP Faraj al-Hassi, in charge of medical programs.
In Libya, plunged into turmoil since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, “we have enormous experience in managing armed conflicts”, he says, but the crisis born from the floods caused by storm Daniel “far exceeds our capacities “.
In total, 17 cities and towns were affected. And with each day that passes, “the number of displaced people grows,” he continues.
There are already more than 43,000, according to the UN.
09/22/2023 16:02:47 – Soussa (Libye) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP