LAST UPDATE | 14 Sep 2023

THE UNITED NATIONS has said 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, according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation.

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

More than 5,000 people are believed to have died, with thousands more injured and left homeless.

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.

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.

As much as a quarter of the city has disappeared, emergency officials said.

“Within seconds the water level suddenly rose,” recounted one injured survivor who said he was swept away with his mother in the late-night ordeal before both managed to cling onto and scramble into an empty building downstream.

“The water was rising with us until we got to the fourth floor, the water was up to the second floor,” the unidentified man said from his hospital bed, in testimony published by the Benghazi Medical Center.

“We could hear screams. From the window I saw cars and bodies being carried away by the water. It lasted an hour or an hour and a half — but for us, it felt like a year.”

Hundreds of body bags now line Derna’s mud-caked streets, awaiting mass burials, as traumatised and grieving residents search mangled buildings for missing loved ones and bulldozers clear streets of debris and mountains of sand.

“The scale of the flood disaster in Libya is shocking and it is heartbreaking,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.

Derna lies on a narrow coastal plain, under steep mountains. The only two usable roads from the south take a winding route through the mountains.

Collapsed bridges over the river split the city centre, further hampering movement.

Ossama Ali, a spokesman for an ambulance centre in eastern Libya, said at least 5,100 deaths were recorded in Derna, along with around 100 others elsewhere in eastern Libya.

More than 7,000 people in the city were injured.

A spokesman for the eastern Libyan interior ministry put the death toll in Derna at more than 5,300, according to the state-run news agency.

The number of deaths was likely to increase since teams are still collecting bodies, Ali said. At least 9,000 people are missing, but that number could drop as communications are restored.

The storm hit other areas in eastern Libya, including the towns of Bayda, Susa and Marj.

Derna is 250 kilometres east of Benghazi, where international aid started to arrive on Tuesday.

Neighboring Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, as well as Turkey, Italy and the United Arab Emirates, sent rescue teams and aid.

The UK and German governments sent assistance too, including blankets, sleeping bags, sleeping mats, tents, water filters and generators.

US President Joe Biden also said the United States would send money to relief organisations and coordinate with Libyan authorities and the United Nations to provide additional support.

Authorities transferred hundreds of bodies to morgues in nearby towns. More than 300 were brought to the morgue in the city of Tobruk, 169 kilometres  east of Derna, the local medical centre reported.

Libya is still recovering from the war and chaos that followed the NATO-backed uprising which toppled and killed longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.

The country has been left divided between two rival governments – the UN-brokered, internationally recognised administration based in Tripoli, and a separate administration in the disaster-hit east.

Access to Derna remains severely hampered as roads and bridges have been destroyed and power and phone lines cut to wide areas, where at least 30,000 people are now homeless.

Climate experts have linked the disaster to the impacts of a heating planet combined with Libya’s decaying infrastructure.

Storm Daniel gathered strength during an unusually hot summer and earlier lashed Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece, flooding vast areas and killing at least 27 people.

“Storm Daniel is yet another lethal reminder of the catastrophic impact that a changing climate can have on our world,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk.

- with reporting from Press Association and AFP