It continued for two days. In Libya, where a dam collapsed due to heavy rain in the early morning of the 11th (local time), more than 5,000 people died after being swept away by huge turbid currents, and the fate of at least 10,000 people is unknown. While political instability continued for over 10 years after the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2010, an unexpected torrential downpour turned into the worst disaster.
On the 12th, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Interior of the provisional government in charge of eastern Libya announced on local state-run TV that more than 5,300 people were counted as dead in the northeastern city of Derna alone. A day ago, it was announced that about 2,000 people had died, but the number of victims more than doubled in just half a day. The Arab Red Crescent Society ( IFRC ), an international relief organization in the Arab world, also announced in a briefing on this day that more than 10,000 people have gone missing due to the flood, whose fate is unknown.
Heavy rain is said to have been concentrated for about four hours in the early morning of the 11th. Aun Hawari (41), Secretary General of the Libyan Journalists Association, who was interviewed by Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, said, “The rain started around 1 a.m. on the 11th and became stronger at 2 a.m. “It was rain like I’ve never experienced before,” he said. Finally, about three hours later, at 4:30 a.m., a muddy current hit the city. In coastal Libya, which has a Mediterranean climate, the amount of rain falls is about 5 to 10 mm, but on this day, it rained as much as 100 mm.
If you look at the aerial photo provided by the British BBC ( BBC ), you can see that a huge turbidity caused by a dam collapse hit Derna, destroying the entire city. Al Jazeera reported that the eastern quarter of the city, which had a population of about 125,000, was completely swept away by the turbid current. Provisional government official Hisham Shukiuat said of the turbid current that hit the city at the time of Bibisi, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “It was like a tsunami,” he said. The city is said to have completely lost its functions, with all electricity and communications cut off.
Reuters also reported that the city swept by the turbidity was completely covered with mud, and buildings with their roofs blown off and overturned cars were left abandoned here and there. There are dead bodies lying around in the hallway of a hospital in Derna, and it is crowded with people trying to find their missing family members. “People are struggling to dispose of the rotting corpses,” a volunteer doctor in Derna told CNN . Foreign media reported that this flood is expected to be the largest flood in North Africa since the Algerian flood of 1927, in which about 3,000 people died.The primary cause of this disaster was the torrential rain brought by Cyclone ‘Daniel’ that hit Libya. The powerful low pressure system that brought deadly flooding to Greece last week moved into the Mediterranean and developed into a cyclone스포츠토토. Atmospheric scientists believe that due to global warming, the world’s temperature in July and August of this year reached the highest recorded in meteorological observations, which caused the sea surface temperature to rise sharply, causing a tropical storm. Recently, unprecedented climate disasters such as forest fires and heat waves have been occurring in the Mediterranean region due to climate change.
However, many point out that what turned the torrential rain into a huge disaster was the civil war that continued for more than 10 years after the fall of the Muammar Gaddafi regime. During this period, little investment was made in social infrastructure such as dams and roads in Libya. Weather forecasting and warning systems that can predict and prepare for disasters did not work properly. Daniel crossed the Mediterranean Sea a week ago and struck several countries, but Libya was the only place where catastrophic casualties occurred. Anas Gomati, director of the Sadeq Institute, a Libyan policy research center, said on “They did not inspect and did not issue an evacuation order,” he criticized.
The political situation, divided between East and West, is also slowing down international relief efforts. The Libyan National Army ( LNA ), which dominates the east , is requesting help from the international community, but international aid organizations must go through the UN-approved Government of National Unity in Tripoli ( GNA ) in the west. Leslie Maven, a lecturer in environmental systems at the Open University in the UK, told C&N, “Libya’s complex political situation makes it difficult to coordinate and communicate rescue operations in dangerous situations and to maintain critical infrastructure such as dams.” “He said.