Record rainfall was recorded in the hours leading up to the floods on 10 September 2023, with winds reaching 80 mph in some parts of the country. For many, this was just another downpour, but for the 90 000 residents of the Mediterranean port city of Derna, it became a catastrophe they had to fend off by themselves.
While the disaster has been widely blamed on climate change-induced violent weather, survivors and experts point at the complicity of local authorities in what they say was a fatal failure of public infrastructure during decades of corruption and neglect.
More than 5 000 people were killed in Libya after torrential rains caused two dams to burst near the coastal city of Derna, destroying much of the city and carrying entire neighbourhoods into the sea, local authorities said.
Libya, a North African nation splintered by a war, was ill-prepared for the storm, called Daniel, which swept across the Mediterranean Sea to batter its coastline.
In the city of Derna alone, at least 5 200 people died, said Tarek al-Kharraz, a spokesman for the interior ministry of the government that oversees eastern Libya, according to the Libyan television station al-Masar.
But the floodwaters also swept through other eastern settlements, including Shahhat, Al-Bayda and Marj, and at least 20 000 people were displaced.
Thousands more were missing, and the death toll is likely to rise in the coming days. The flooding left bodies scattered in the streets while buckling buildings, sinking vehicles, and blocking roads, impeding access to the most stricken areas.
“We still cannot comprehend the magnitude of what has happened,” said Jawhar Ali, 28, a Derna native who lives in Turkey and spent two sleepless nights seeking news from his family back home, where communications were cut off by the disasters.
“The shock we are experiencing is terrible.’’
Analysts said the country’s woes – political division, economic instability, corruption, environmental degradation and dilapidated infrastructure-seemed to coalesce in one catastrophe when the dams south of the city collapsed.
The flooding came days after an earthquake in Morocco, another North African nation, killed more than 2 900 people.
But to Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute, a Libyan policy research centre, the two events felt profoundly different, given the unpredictable timing of the earth’s tremors compared with a storm like Daniel, which can be forecast or days ahead.
Even after the storm displayed its destructive power last week in Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria, killing more than a dozen people, Libyan authorities seemed to have no thoughtful plan to monitor the dams, warn residents or evacuate them, El Gomati said.
The dams unleashed water that poured through Derna, a city of roughly 100 000 people, Ahmed al-Mismari, a spokesman for the Libyan National Army, the dominant political force in the area, said in a televised news conference.
“It’s the first time we’ve been exposed to this type of weather,” al-Mismari said, calling the scenario “completely unexpected”.
Conditions were making it difficult to orchestrate rescue and aid operations, with all roads to the most affected areas either cut off or nearly cut off.
The flooding recalled the effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the storm struck Louisiana and became a calamity after levees in New Orleans ruptured, inundating vast parts of the city.
It also underscored how climate change can combine with political conflicts and economic failure to magnify the scale of disasters.
Libya is divided between the internationally recognised government based in Tripoli, the capital, and a separately administered region in the east, including Derna – where the main power broker is the Libyan National Army and its commander, Khalifa Hifter, a longtime militia leader.
“Libya for the past 10 years has gone through one war to another, one political crisis to another,” said Claudia Gazzini, a senior Libya analyst for the International Crisis Group.
“Essentially this has meant that, for the past 10 years, there hasn’t really been much investment in the country’s infrastructure.”
The country is also especially vulnerable to climate change and severe storms.
Warming causes the waters of the Mediterranean to expand and its sea levels to rise, eroding shorelines and contributing to flooding, with low-lying coastal areas of Libya at particular risk, according to the United Nations.
On average, hurricane-like storms form once or twice a year over the Mediterranean Sea, usually in autumn, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
As human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases warm the planet, rainstorms of many kinds generally deliver heavier loads of precipitation for a simple reason: Hotter air can hold more moisture.
Most of Libya’s population lives in coastal areas, and intense storm surges could wreak widespread infrastructural damage, warned a 2021 brief from the Climate Security Expert Network, a group advising on climate-related security risks.
A local official speaking to al-Masar said that another dam in the eastern region was filled with water and on the brink of collapse.
The Jaza dam – located between Derna and the city of Benghazi – needed maintenance to prevent another disaster, the major of the municipality of Tocra, Mahmoud Al Sharaima, said.
“The residents of Derna are searching for the bodies of their loved ones by digging with their hands and simple agricultural tools.”
*Dr Moses Amweelo is a former minister of works, transport and communication. He earned a doctorate in technical science, industrial engineering and management from the International Transport Academy (St. Petersburg, Russia)