After watching their neighbours swept away from rooftops, flood-ravaged Libyans face unimaginable new horrors.
on Friday to allow search teams to dig through the mud and hollowed-out buildings for 10,000 people missing and feared dead after the official toll from flooding soared past 11,000.Two dams collapsed in exceptionally heavy rains from Mediterranean storm Daniel early Monday, sending aRescuers retrieve the body of a flooding victim in Derna, Libya.contributed to the enormous toll
Heaps of twisted metal and flooded cars littered Derna's streets, which are caked in a tan mud. Teams have buried bodies in mass graves outside the city and in nearby towns, Eastern Libya's health minister, Othman Abduljaleel, said. "The waves swept people away from the tops of buildings, and we could see people carried by floodwater," among them his neighbours, he said.
Flooding aftermath in Derna, Libya, Thursday, September14, 2023. Search teams are combing streets, wrecked buildings, and even the sea to look for bodies in Derna, where the collapse of two dams unleashed a massive flash flood that killed thousands of people. Even before the flooding, Trabelsi said the "efforts and the capacity" to detect and demine areas were limited. After the floods, she said, explosive devices may have been swept to "new, undetected areas."
To allow emergency crews to do their work, residents were being evacuated from Derna and only search-and-rescue teams would be allowed to enter, Salam al-Fergany, director general of the Ambulance and Emergency Service in eastern Libya, announced late on Thursday.
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