Libya Flooding Death Toll Tops 1,000, about 10,000 Still Missing

Rescue teams in eastern Libya have retrieved the bodies of more than 1,000 victims from the rubble in a coastal city that has been inundated by devastating floods, an official said yesterday, after visiting the devastated area.

Authorities estimated that as many as 2,000 people were killed in the city of Derna alone from flooding brought by Mediterranean Storm Daniel.

A report from the CBS News quoted Libya envoy for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Tamer Ramadan, to have said 10,000 people were missing after the unprecedented floods.

Speaking to reporters at a U.N. briefing in Geneva via videoconference from Tunisia, he said the death toll was “huge” and expected to reach into the thousands in the coming days.

“I returned from Derna. It is very disastrous. Bodies are lying everywhere — in the sea, in the valleys, under the buildings,” the Reuters news agency quoted Hichem Chkiouat, Minister of Civil Aviation and a member of the emergency committee for the administration in eastern Libya, to have said in a phone interview earlier.

“The number of bodies recovered in Derna is more 1,000,” he told Reuters, adding that it was too early to gauge the full scale of the loss of human lives, but that he expected it to be “really, really big.”

“I am not exaggerating when I say that 25 per cent of the city has disappeared,” Chkiouat added.

“Many, many buildings have collapsed.”

Ahmed al-Mosmari, a spokesman for the country’s armed forces based in the east, had said at a news conference on Monday that there were between 5,000 and 6,000 reported missing.

Al-Mosmari attributed the catastrophe to the collapse of two nearby dams, causing a lethal flash flood. Many towns in eastern Libya have been hit by the floods, but the worst destruction was in Derna, where heavy rainfall and floods broke the dams and washed away entire neighborhoods.

Ossama Hamad, prime minister of the east Libya government, said several thousand people were missing in the city and many were believed to have been carried away after two upstream dams burst.

After more than a decade of chaos, Libya remains divided between two rival administrations: one in the east and one in the west, each backed by militias and foreign governments.

The conflict had left the oil rich country with crumbling and inadequate infrastructure.

Derna residents posted videos online showing major devastation. Entire residential blocks were erased along Wadi Derna, a river that runs down from the mountains through the city center. Multi-story apartment buildings that once stood well back from the river were partially collapsed into mud.

Emergency responders, including troops, government workers, volunteers and residents were digging through the rubble to recover the dead. They also used inflatable boats to retrieve bodies from the water. Excavators and other equipment had yet to arrive in the city.

Residents described scenes of chaos when floods hit the center. They heard loud explosions at night and realised that dams outside the city collapsed, sending a wall of water that “erased everything in its way,” said Ahmed Abdalla, a Derna resident.

Workers said they had buried more than 200 bodies in one cemetery on Monday evening.