DERNA (Libya): A global aid effort for Libya gathered pace Thursday after a tsunami-sized flash flood killed at least 4,000 people, with thousands more missing — a death toll the UN blamed in part on the legacy of years of war and chaos.
The enormous surge of storm water burst two upstream river dams late Sunday and reduced the city of Derna to an apocalyptic wasteland where entire city blocks and untold numbers of people were washed into the Mediterranean.
“Within seconds the water level suddenly rose,” recounted one injured survivor who said he was swept away with his mother in the late-night ordeal before both managed to cling onto and scramble into an empty building downstream.
“The water was rising with us until we got to the fourth floor, the water was up to the second floor,” the unidentified man said from his hospital bed, in testimony published by the Benghazi Medical Center.
“We could hear screams. From the window I saw cars and bodies being carried away by the water. It lasted an hour or an hour and a half — but for us, it felt like a year.”
Hundreds of body bags now line Derna’s mud-caked streets, awaiting mass burials, as traumatised and grieving residents search mangled buildings for missing loved ones and bulldozers clear streets of debris and mountains of sand.
“The scale of the flood disaster in Libya is shocking and it is heartbreaking,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths.
“Entire neighbourhoods have been wiped off the map. Whole families, taken by surprise, were swept away in the deluge of water. Thousands have died, tens of thousands are now homeless and many more remain unaccounted for.”
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