Text/Hu Yukun
Editor/Qi Fei
Over the past week, Hurricane Daniel has caused an astonishing disaster as it made landfall in the North African nation of Libya.
Nowhere has it been hit harder than in and around the eastern Mediterranean coastal city of Derna, where two dams burst and much of the city has been completely flooded, and the death toll has exceeded 10,000 and counting.
Although regarded as an unprecedented disaster, Daniel has completely exposed Libya's vulnerability. Despite having Africa's largest oil and gas reserves, the country has been ravaged by civil war and secession for years, and is extremely ill-equipped to cope with disasters. Perhaps the floods will serve as a wake-up call to the North African country and draw regional and international attention to the Libyan issue. However, the price of one time is high enough, and the Libyan people can no longer withstand the destruction of any natural disasters and man-made disasters.
The current situation in Derna.
Why Libya is "hurting the most"
"I've never seen anything like that in my life." Ibrahim Ozur, vice president of the Turkish Red Crescent Society, told the BBC after leading his rescue team to Derna. Having experienced a major earthquake in his home country this year, he described the scene as "as if he had been hit hard by an earthquake at the same time."
Footage from the scene shows that the coastal neighborhood of Derna was almost completely destroyed by flooding. Hundreds of body bags containing victims lined up mud-covered streets, waiting to be buried. Residents who returned to Derna from abroad did not want to restart their lives, but to identify their loved ones who had died. However, access to the affected areas remains very difficult due to the destruction of roads and bridges and extensive damage to electricity and telephone lines.
Derna after the flood.
Al Jazeera's Tripoli correspondent Ahmed Khalifa said divers reported dozens of cars at sea full of family members. He noted that many families tried to flee at the first moment of the flood, but the torrent swept them into the sea.
The official figures are shocking: so far, the floods have killed more than 11,400 people in Libya (11,300 of them residents of Derna); As rescue efforts have not yet been completed, between 10,000 and 100,000 residents remain unaccounted for. The municipality of Derna estimates that the number of victims in the city could reach 20,000. The international press believes that the figure could be higher.
In addition to the staggering number of victims, the floods have left irreparable wounds on survivors. The International Organization for Migration said on September 15 that at least 30,000 people had lost their homes in the city of Derna alone. If you add the hardest-hit cities such as Beida, Marj and Benghazi, at least 38,000 people have been displaced across Libya. For Derna, a population of about 100,000, the hurricane killed more than half of the city's residents.
Illustration of hydrology and flood damage in the city of Derna.
Daniel is undoubtedly the deadliest hurricane since Typhoon Nargis in the North Indian Ocean in 2008, and the meteorological disaster that has killed the most people this year, mainly in Libya.
The Mediterranean Sea is surrounded by land and few hurricanes of this intensity have formed, not even before 2011. Libya is not the first country affected by this in terms of landfall time - since September 4, "Daniel" has affected Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Egypt, Israel and other countries on both sides of the Mediterranean, causing high winds, heavy rainfall and deaths in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria. However, the death toll in these three countries combined is less than 30.
In theory, Libya originally had a warning, preparation and evacuation time of nearly a week, but it turned out to be "the most injured", which made the outside world feel doubtful and puzzled.
The direct cause of the damage to Derna was the bursting of two nearby dams. The city of Derna, built along the lower reaches of the Wadi Derna, has a history of uneven rainfall, with floods in 1941, 1959, 1968 and 1986.
In 1977, a former Yugoslav company built two dams, the Al-Bilad Dam and the Abu Mansour Dam. They were all inaugurated upstream south of the city of Derna, 13 km and 1 km respectively.
National dams on Google Maps.
Both dams are earth-rock dams, built of compressed laterite and stone, which means they are vulnerable to long-term infiltration and are more likely to burst as water overflows over the top of the dam and must be maintained regularly. Unfortunately, according to Ahmed Madroud, deputy mayor of Derna, the two dams have never been properly maintained since 2002, and no substantial progress has been made on the maintenance works allocated more than $2 million between 2012 and 2013.
Libya's attorney general, Siddiq Sur, said dam operators had reported cracks in both dams as early as 1998. Two years later, the Libyan government hired an Italian engineering firm to assess the damage to the dam. The latter confirmed cracks in the dam and proposed the construction of a third dam.
Gaddafi's government handed over the dam repair to Turkey's Alceles Construction Company in 2007. Work did not start until October 2010 due to payment problems, but was suspended less than five months after the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime. An official, who asked not to be named, told AFP that the government had since earmarked funds for dam repairs every year, but officials "only took money and did not do anything".
In 2022, Libyan hydrologist Badell Vanis Ashur warned in a study that if the dam is not repaired, Derna will suffer disaster. But this warning was not heeded by the Libyan authorities.
Before the rainy season in Derna, which runs from October to March, "Daniel" brings rare storms and 440 mm of rain, far exceeding the city's annual average of 274 mm. Under the torrential rains, two dams of insufficient height and volume broke one after another.
According to the analysis of the journal Eos of the American Geophysical Union, the most likely scenario is that the upstream national dam could not withstand the impact of heavy rain and broke the dike first, and the flood quickly fell with the help of the drop, and the Abu Mansour Dam collapsed. At this point, the 30 million cubic meters of flood current, equivalent to 12,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, had no room to slow down and rushed directly towards the coastal city of 100,000 people.
Abu Mansour Dam on Google Maps.
Thus, this eastern coastal city brings together the most unfavorable objective factors. But in addition to force majeure, dam bursts also have a human factor. Anas El Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute for Libya's Centre for Policy Studies, put it bluntly: "We all say it's a natural disaster, but it's actually a man-made disaster — it's the incompetence of Libya's political elite." ”
The floods come two days after another North African country, Morocco, also struck an earthquake that killed nearly 3,000 people as of September 16. But Gomati argues that Libya's "man-made disaster" is more serious because the timing of earthquakes is unpredictable, whereas hurricanes like Daniel can be predicted hours or even days in advance.
At the macro level, the United Nations defines Libya as "the only country in the world that has not yet developed any response to climate change." When Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria saw the destructive power of this meteorological disaster, the Libyan authorities did not carefully monitor the actual situation of the two dams, nor did they warn or fully evacuate the residents of the areas that may be affected.
The mayor of Derna, Abdel-Munem Qaisi, insisted he ordered the evacuation "three or four days before the disaster arrived," but some local experts gave the opposite account, saying that the city's security department told citizens not to leave and imposed a curfew on the night of September 10, preventing people from leaving their homes.
In 2011, when Gaddafi's 42-year rule was overthrown, Libya was mired in political strife, military strife, and regime separation. Over the next decade, the country was torn apart by civil war, in which foreign powers, including the United States, participated.
The Libyan civil war in 2011 divided the country from then on.
Today, Libya has two de facto regimes: a "government of national unity" recognized by the United Nations, which controls the western region (the capital Tripoli); The other is the National Assembly, which controls the eastern and central regions and is allied with General Khalifa Haftar and his "national army". The country's rulers include the western regime, led by Prime Minister Abdel Hamid Debeiba, and the eastern regime, led by Osama Hamad. There are dozens of military organizations that remain influential.
Fighter of the Libyan National Unity Government Army.
Some local residents admitted that they had received conflicting messages from the two opposing regimes in the East and West on whether and when to evacuate. Under these circumstances, even the people who received the evacuation news may not understand the horror of the flood, believing that the warning is just "exaggerated", thus missing the best time to evacuate.
"Even if poor infrastructure is not improved immediately, if it is properly coordinated, they could have issued warnings, and the emergency management force could have carried out the evacuation of people, which would have avoided the vast majority of casualties." The words of the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, were full of regret and regret. However, a rare "natural disaster", under the amplification of the long-accumulated "man-made disaster", caused tens of thousands of innocent Libyans to bear the most terrible price.
It is difficult to achieve synergy between divided governments
Under pressure, Libyan Attorney General Sur said he had begun investigating the cause of the collapse of two dams in the eastern city of Derna. The investigation could implicate top officials from Libya's eastern and western regimes. Sur said investigators came from different parts of Libya and covered matters such as where money for dam repairs flowed.
A Libyan television station, citing a September 14 release by the city government of Derna, reported that the mayor of Derna, Gacy, had been suspended and was under investigation. Prime Minister De Beiba, the prime minister of Tripoli's government, said he and his ministers were responsible for the dam's maintenance, but not for the deaths caused by the floods.
For Libya, the direct loss of life and property caused by the floods is probably just the beginning.
As the worst disaster in the Cyrenaica region since the 1963 Mayj earthquake, the Libyan floods directly affected the lives of some 880,000 people in five governorates, with far-reaching consequences. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) noted that the natural disaster was an "unprecedented humanitarian crisis" fraught with enormous challenges. The floods swept over the entire city of Derna, impacting Libya's increasingly fragile state capacity.
Destroyed by the flood.
At present, the hardest-hit areas represented by Derna lack drinking water, food, electricity, fuel, and communication facilities have been wiped out in the raging floods. In this situation, the remains of the deceased relatives cannot be found, and the surviving residents are also facing a crisis that their basic survival is unsustainable.
Even more frightening than the lack of basic materials is the spread of disease: due to the lack of professional teams to assist in processing, claiming and burying, the bodies of the victims are piled up on the streets or buried in "mass graves" in the suburbs, increasing the possibility of disease transmission and even causing epidemics. The leader of a search and rescue team reluctantly said they didn't even have enough body bags to hold the remains.
Five days after the floods, the number of poisoning incidents contaminated with drinking water has risen to 150. Hamad, the leader of Libya's eastern parliament, said on September 15 that authorities would take precautionary measures, which could include a blockade of the city of Derna, due to fears of the spread of the disease. Meanwhile, Haider Sayyah, director of the coalition government's National Center for Disease Control, declared a state of emergency for a year in all parts of eastern Syria.
Syrian rescue workers salvage the bodies of the victims.
Generally speaking, the disproportionate damage caused by natural disasters and the poor organization of local relief are often manifestations of the insufficient capacity of the affected countries. The fact that the international community wants to do its best to rescue Libya is a unique phenomenon in Libya's disaster relief and a special manifestation of the country's fragility.
Following the floods, the United Nations launched a flash appeal on 14 September at the request of Libyan authorities, asking donors to provide US$71.4 million over the next three months to meet the needs of some 250,000 people affected by the floods.
In addition, UNICEF urgently allocated emergency supplies such as medical kits, medical supplies, hygiene items and volunteer kits, and the ICRC provided 6,000 body bags and emergency supplies. On the same day, USAID announced an upfront $1 million in humanitarian assistance and a disaster response team to the field. Rescue teams from the United Nations, the European Union and Middle Eastern countries also arrived in Libya.
But for rescue teams, even stepping into the disaster zone became a problem. Ozur of the Turkish Red Crescent mentioned that after Turkey's first rescue team reached the eastern city of Benghazi, it took a full 10 hours to reach Derna, 250 kilometers away. This is due to the serious damage to road facilities and inaccessibility on the one hand, and the lack of a genuine central government in Libya to coordinate and direct disaster relief efforts.
Political factors have been an overwhelming factor complicating search and rescue and humanitarian response. The long-standing confrontation between the east and the west, combined with local armed forces in the south-west and south, has led to a political fragmentation of the country and a lack of unified authority. This time, the hardest-hit areas are under the rule of the eastern regime, but it is the western regime that controls the core resources.
The situation of the Libyan regime. Source: Al Majalla
Claudia Gazzini, senior analyst for Libya at the Belgian think tank International Crisis Group, explains: "The limitations of the Tripoli government [the national unity government] are that it cannot reach the eastern region, and the limitations of the eastern authorities (the National Assembly) are that it needs the (financial) support of the Tripoli government." ”
It can be said that this disaster has contributed to the rare situation of opposing governments cooperating to help the victims. As recently as 2020, the two sides were in a state of full-scale war. General Khalifa Haftar's forces tried to capture the capital, killing thousands at one point.
Unfortunately, this cooperation is still far from sufficient. Mary Fitzgerald, an expert on Libya at the Middle East Institute, a US think tank, pointed out that the eastern authorities are not yet fully open to outsiders, and the current gap in relief needs is so large that neither regime can cope with the situation alone.
In the absence of synergy between the two regimes, the effectiveness of the two regimes has not been effective, despite the active participation of private actors in the rescue.
It is worth noting that most of the countries that first went to the affected areas were "allies" that recognized the eastern regime, such as the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey, which recognized the national unity government but had economic ties to eastern Libya. By contrast, countries that support the government of national unity have fallen short in terms of strength and ease of relief — the United States has said it will send relief teams and supplies in coordination with the United Nations and its recognized authorities in Tripoli.
Egyptian troops come to the rescue in Derna.
Under the division between East and West, Libya has neither the ability nor the importance of infrastructure construction, and the country's disaster prevention capacity is extremely fragile, which will also hinder the effective progress of the country's disaster relief work. In the days following the disaster, the amount of supplies reaching the flood-affected areas remained low.
In the absence of a unified political authority, cities represented by Derna will face a long and difficult road to reconstruction. Needless to say, with a marked economic downturn and no guarantee of domestic security, neither the eastern and western authorities were able to rebuild the affected areas without foreign aid.
"My concern is that [recovery and reconstruction] will take a long time." Hasadi, a 44-year-old Libyan teacher, said: "This needs to be sustained, but I am concerned that the support that is coming now is only temporary." ”
Slightly encouragingly, a week after the floods, survivors were still rescued from the rubble. Libyan channels released a video on September 17 showing the rescue of a family of 11 trapped under the rubble of a building in Derna.
(The author is a member of the China Translators Association and a columnist in international politics)