The Libyan authorities curbed access to much of the northeastern city of Derna on Friday, as health officials and relief crews struggled to handle thousands of victims of the floods that have devastated the region.
Only emergency medical workers will be allowed to enter the city, after streams of people arrived with no direction or coordination, hampering search-and-rescue efforts, said Osama Ali, a spokesman for an ambulance center in the country’s east.
Ordinary Libyans desperately seeking loved ones missing or killed in the flood, and volunteers eager to help and show solidarity with their countrymen, are among those making their way to the city.
The authorities “are still looking for people in collapsed buildings, but the chance of finding survivors is diminishing by the hour,” said Rick Brennan, who directs the World Health Organization’s emergency response for the Eastern Mediterranean. “We expect, unfortunately, that most of the missing will not be found alive,” he added.
The catastrophe has prompted an outpouring of international support, with the United States and several European countries vowing to send aid. But Libya is split into two rival governments — one in the west, based in Tripoli, and one in the east — and its terrain has been torn up by the path of the flood, further complicating relief efforts. Key parts of Derna’s infrastructure, including bridges that once crossed the city’s river basin, were erased by the torrential water.
Rains from Storm Daniel shattered two dams near Derna, on Libya’s northeastern coast, over the weekend, destroying much of the city and washing entire neighborhoods out into the Mediterranean Sea. The authorities say the death toll runs into the thousands, with many more people missing.
By Friday morning, electricity and running water had returned to some parts of Derna, relief workers said, and people were trickling in from outside the city to identify loved ones before they were buried. Some of the bodies had been laid out, wrapped in blankets, in the streets, they said.
“The sea is full of corpses. There are bodies under the rubble. We’re still pulling them out,” said Hawwa el-Bannani, a Benghazi-based doctor who traveled to the city on an aid mission.
At least hundreds were hastily buried in mass graves outside the city, health officials said, in part due to fears that they might spread disease. Three top international health organizations, including the World Health Organization, said in a joint statement on Friday that the corpses of those killed in natural disasters generally posed little such risk.
Residents who did not flee the city have mostly gathered in temporary shelters set up in schools, sleeping on classroom floors, said Sarraj bin Taher, a Red Crescent paramedic in Derna, many still looking for family and friends lost in the flood. “People are in a state of shock,” he said. “The city was wiped out around them.”
The authorities have issued widely varying…
2023-09-15 23:05:53
Post from www.nytimes.com
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