More than 5,000 presumed dead in Libya after flooding

(CMR) More than 5,000 people are presumed dead, and 10,000 missing in Libya after Mediterranean storm Daniel unleashed heavy rains causing two dams to collapse.

The collapsed dams increased water levels in already flooded areas, claiming lives and washing away whole neighborhoods,

Tamer Ramadan, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya,  said, “The death toll is huge.”

The interior ministry of Libya’s eastern government on Tuesday said more than 5,300 people were dead. Of those who were killed, at least 145 were Egyptian, officials in the northeastern city of Tobruk, in Libya, said on Tuesday.

According to CNN, in the city of Derna, which has seen the worst of the devastation, as many as 6,000 people remained missing, Othman Abduljalil, health minister in Libya’s eastern administration, told Libya’s Almasar TV.

Whole neighborhoods are believed to have been washed away in the city, according to authorities.

Dead bodies have been left outside the morgues on the sidewalks as hospitals in Derna are no longer operable, and the morgues are full, Osama Aly, an Emergency and Ambulance service spokesperson, said.

“There are no first-hand emergency services. People are working at the moment to collect the rotting bodies,” said Anas Barghathy, a doctor currently volunteering in Derna.

Relatives of people who lived in the destroyed city of Derna told CNN they were terrified after seeing videos of the flooding, with no word from their family members.

Emad Milad, a resident of Tobrok, said eight of his relatives died in the flooding in Derma.

“My wife Areej’s sister and her husband both passed away. His whole family is also dead. A total of eight people are all gone. It’s a disaster. It’s a disaster. We are praying for better things,” he said on Tuesday.

CNN reported that the rain, which has swept across several cities in Libya’s north-east, is the result of a very strong low-pressure system that brought catastrophic flooding to Greece last week and moved into the Mediterranean before developing into a tropical-like cyclone known as a medicane.

The temperature of the Mediterranean is well above average, which scientists say fueled the storm’s heavy rainfall.

“The warmer water does not only fuel those storms in terms of rainfall intensity, it also makes them more ferocious,” Karsten Haustein, climate scientist and meteorologist at Leipzig University in Germany, told the Science Media Center.