A spectacular rise in groundwater in the town of Zliten in western Libya has pushed dozens of families to flee their flood-damaged homes, raising fears of an environmental crisis. While the deadly floods which devastated the town of Derna, in eastern Libya, in September are still on everyone’s minds, Zliten, located 160 kilometers from the capital Tripoli, and its countryside have for two months seen the soil oozing and water tables continue to rise.

According to residents of the city of 350,000, the phenomenon is not new in this region, but its current scale is unprecedented. Dozens of houses, streets and farms were flooded, but the urban center was largely spared.

“The water started appearing two months ago and continues to rise until it submerges our well. All my fruit trees – apple trees, apricot trees, pomegranate trees – are dead,” Mohamad Ali Dioub, owner of a farm about 4 kilometers from the center of Zliten, told AFP. “I was able to save these few date trees because we bought sand to cover part of the land (…) and rented tankers to pump the overflowing septic tank,” says the sixty-year-old, helpless in the face of the extent of the problem in this area which is not connected to water or sewer networks.

“The earth smells bad.”

Families, fearing that the situation will get worse, are leaving their houses filled with water which have subsided in places, with cracked or completely collapsed walls. In addition, stagnant water and mud in the streets and palm groves have attracted mosquitoes and give off foul odors. The land, usually sandy and light in color, “is now muddy, black and smells bad,” describes Mohamad Al-Nouari, owner of land completely covered in water.

The authorities, who fear an environmental crisis or damage to homes putting their residents at risk, have mobilized. Nearly fifty families were relocated or received an allowance for renting accommodation, according to the city’s mayor, Moftah Hamadi.

At a cabinet meeting on February 6, Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah promised Zliten residents that his government “will spare no effort” to “address this crisis in a scientific and rapid manner.” He urged the ministers concerned to take the necessary measures to compensate or relocate the affected families. Several state institutions, including the authority managing the Great Artificial River which irrigates a large part of Libya, the general electricity company and the water company are mobilized.

A city known for its palm and olive groves

The National Center for Disease Control dispatched emergency teams, equipment and pesticides to contain the mosquito problem. Alongside these measures, teams of foreign experts, including British, Greeks and Egyptians, have visited this city one after the other to try to identify the origin of the problem and find remedies designed to prevent the city from being engulfed as the fear the residents.

Zliten, a coastal town surrounded by an area once covered by salt marshes, is home to Al-Asmariya University, one of the most important and prestigious Sufi shrines in Libya. But it is best known for its palm groves and olive groves, which produce one of the country’s most prized oils, which is now threatened.

Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, Libya has been plagued by political instability which has often degenerated into armed conflict between rival camps based respectively in the capital Tripoli and Benghazi (east). In September 2023, Storm Daniel hit eastern Libya, including Derna, a city of 100,000 on the Mediterranean, breaking two dams and triggering a tsunami-sized flood that carried everything in its path. These floods left more than 4,300 dead and more than 8,000 missing, according to figures from the UN and the World Bank which estimated the cost of reconstruction at $1.8 billion.