Libya, thousands of deaths between water and mud: the massacre of Derna – time.news

2023-09-13 01:52:22

by Lorenzo Cremonesi

The two dams built by Tito crumbled, the sudden wave, the corpses: this is how the hurricane overwhelmed Cyrenaica. In the country torn apart since the end of Gaddafi, the political stalemate prevents any reconstruction

Voices of women and children form the background to the roar of the muddy water which flows unstoppably between the houses from the mouth of the wadi between the mountains. late at night, the lights in the center go out one by one, until the darkness vibrates with fear. In a matter of seconds what is usually, even in the winter months, a trickle of smelly sewage transforms into a terrifying wave of destruction and death. The voices become high-pitched, tremulous, they invoke Allah. Another video shows dozens and dozens of corpses, which become hundreds in daylight, placed by people on the street in front of the Wahda hospital, in the downtown area, not far from the sea, where fishermen are now trying to recover the bodies of those dragged offshore. Nobody was ready. We were sleeping when the disaster hit us. It happened very quickly, there was no time to do anything, say the witnesses who send the videos of their stories via the few who managed to leave the disaster area or post them online on social media via the very rare satellite connections.

It is probably not wrong or exaggerated to call it the Libyan Vajont. Indeed, it easily falls short. Because if the Italian tragedy of 1963 caused around 2,000 deaths, the one in Derna two days ago could exceed 10,000. These are, at least for the moment, the estimates of the local authorities. Nearly 1,000 have already been buried. Over 10,000 people are missing. Tripoli sends aid. Yesterday the Italian civil protection men arrived in Derna to evaluate what to send. The US promises support. Egypt, Turkey and the Emirates have already sent planes loaded with essential goods. A tragedy caused by the storm that meteorologists have named Daniel and which had already caused damage in southern Italy and Greece at the end of last week, but which unleashed all its explosive force on Cyrenaica and in particular in the area of ​​the Green Mountains above Derna . Above all, the Libyan tragedy also concerns dams, not one as it was for Italy 60 years ago, but two. The main cause of the damage to the town was the structural failure of two water dams built in the early seventies in the mountains south of Derna, some experts and foreign observers in Cyrenaica confirmed.

Thanks to the witnesses on site we can try to reconstruct the dynamics of the events. Around midnight between Sunday and Monday the tropical cyclone hits the coasts of eastern Libya. High pressure dominates over the Mediterranean and the gap between heat and humidity intensifies the force of the water bomb, which is accompanied by turbulence and very strong winds. The rain pours down on the fertile plateaus of northern Cyrenaica, lashes and floods with unusual violence the countryside and agricultural villages, many of which were founded at the time of Italian colonization. Some bridges fall, including a historic one built by Italo Balbo in the 1930s and overlooked by the modern one designed by the architect Morandi (the same as the Genoa bridge), which instead remains standing. Then the water cascades into the beds of the dry streams and reaches the major junction of Wadi Derna, which flows into the sea.

Here there are two artificial barriers built by the former Yugoslavia between 1970 and 1973, children of the era in which the young Muammar Gaddafi, fresh from the coup and eager to break with Western governments, went arm in arm with Tito and looked for allies in the front of the non-aligned countries. The first, that of Mansour, 45 meters high and 130 meters wide, contains approximately one and a half million cubic meters of water and is 12 kilometers from Derna. It doesn’t withstand the impact and falls apart. The wave advances another 11 kilometers towards the sea and encounters the largest barrier, just one kilometer from the southern outskirts of Derna. The second dam, 75 meters high and 300 meters wide, contains 18 million cubic meters of water. And it doesn’t hold up either. At this point a tsunami: it is half past two in the morning when it hits the sleeping city.

The testimony of a water works expert, Abdelwanees Ashoor, was posted on Libyan social media, who a year ago had warned about the structural weakness of the two dams and the urgent need for them to be strengthened. It should be added that this is the general situation in Libya twelve years after the violent overthrow of Gaddafi’s regime thanks to the revolution assisted by NATO: the entire country falls to pieces, the open clash between the governments of Tripoli and that of Benghazi paralyzes any project of large-scale reconstruction. The same approximately 60,000 inhabitants of Derna, out of the original 90,000, today live among the rubble of recent armed clashes. It is estimated that around 25 percent of the urban center was swept away by the waters.

September 12, 2023 (modified September 12, 2023 | 11:06 pm)

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