“We saw death.” Residents of the stricken Derna recount the first moments of the disaster
It was two o’clock after midnight, and the storm was hitting strongly, in eastern Libya, when Abdel Moneim Awad Al-Sheikh heard screaming, so he jumped out of his bed to see water everywhere, and waves taking off the doors of houses and drowning everything.
On the stairs of his shattered house, he was sitting on Sunday, contemplating the destruction, with traces of shock still visible on his face, as he told Agence France-Presse how he and his family survived a disaster that resulted in the death and loss of thousands.
The 73-year-old Sheikh says that he was in his bed when he started hearing screaming from outside. “I left the house and did not take anything with me except my glasses and my mobile phone. I went out and found water… shaking the iron doors” of the houses in the building.
A child contemplates the devastation that befell his family’s home after the Hurricane Daniel disaster in Derna (AFP)
The sheikh saw the door of a house in the building being dislodged by the flow of water. He lived on the first floor with his wife, and he had two sons who lived with their families in the same building on two floors higher.
The sheikh and his wife went up to the fourth floor, and within minutes, the water began to recede and move towards the nearby riverbed, according to him.
But that was not the end of the nightmare. The sheikh said that after about a third of an hour, “my son shouted from above that another wave was coming and it was larger than the first, about 20 meters high.”
The sheikh, whose hair was turning gray, explained that he and his family then went up to the fifth floor, and they all moved to the roof of his neighbor’s house, who is his cousin. He says: “We placed a wooden ladder, moved to the second roof, and sat until after dawn when young men came to us and helped us,” noting that one of these volunteers “lost his entire family.”
Heavy rains, which fell in huge quantities on areas in eastern Libya, on September 11, led to the collapse of two dams in Derna, causing water to flow strongly into a river that is usually dry. The water washed away parts of the city, along with its buildings and infrastructure. Water flowed several meters high, what some described as a “tsunami,” and destroyed the bridges linking the east and west of the city.
For his part, Libyan Mohammed Al-Zawi (25 years old) said that “all of our belongings and furniture were moving” on the surface of the water.
He explained that the first wave did not exceed the level of the sidewalk, and did not enter the homes, but the second came “strongly” and touched the second and third floors, adding that the cliff “brought with it cars, belongings, and people inside cars, and then poured everything into the sea.”
He added: “We received warnings one day before that heavy rain was expected, and that we should stay at home, but nothing else.”
Muhammad sits in the street opposite his house, contemplating the scene of destruction in shock.
The young man survived with his family, consisting of 9 members, after they were able to climb to the roof of their two-story house, from which one can only exit via the first floor, after the water level dropped, so they went down to the street.
Near the house, he says he saw “between 25 and 30 bodies.” He looked for blankets to cover them, he said, before trying to check on the neighborhoods and whether they needed help.
In light of the difficulty of access, communications, relief operations, and the chaos prevailing in Libya even before the disaster, there are conflicting figures on the number of victims. Ministers in the eastern government gave inconsistent numbers in the first days. However, in the latest toll, the Minister of Health in the government of eastern Libya, Othman Abdel Jalil, reported yesterday evening, Sunday, that 3,283 people had been killed, while international humanitarian organizations and Libyan officials warn that the final toll may be much higher due to the large number of missing people, estimated at thousands.
For his part, the Lebanese Muhammad Abdel Hafeez (50 years old), who has lived in Libya for decades, says: “I saw death, but life has a rest.”
He narrates that he was sleeping when he felt that “the world shook.” He thought that an earthquake was occurring, and he called his sister and father to go down to the street, but soon he went out to the balcony of his house on the third floor, and saw that the water had reached it.
They went up to the upper floors and sat for an hour and a half, waiting for the water level to drop.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) expressed concerns about two other dams in Libya, after they were reported to be bearing huge amounts of pressure, following the devastating floods that the country witnessed.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated that the two dams in question are the Wadi Jazza Dam between the partially destroyed cities of Derna and Benghazi, and the Wadi al-Qattara Dam near Benghazi.
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2023-09-18 08:30:17
