“Most” of the deaths could have been avoided. It is with this sentence, which sounds like a sentence, that the UN yesterday castigated the management of the crisis in Libya, where spectacular floods caused the death of nearly 4,000 people near the coastal town of Derna, according to latest assessments still very fragmentary.
Storm Daniel caused the destruction of two dams upstream of the city in the northeast of the country. A quarter of Derna, the most affected municipality, was covered by water, tens of thousands of people found themselves homeless.
“They could have issued warnings and the emergency management services could have evacuated people, and we could have avoided most of the human losses,” Petteri Taalas, director of the Meteorological Organization, said on Wednesday. world, the UN agency.
The town of Derna, in north-eastern Libya, was devastated by floods
© / The Express
A toll that could approach 10,000 deaths
Entire streets, filled with vehicles, houses and many people, were swept into the Mediterranean Sea by the waves. According to a worrying estimate from the International Federation of the Red Cross, the final toll could be around 10,000 dead.
The authorities had been warned by the Libyan meteorological agency 72 hours before the storm arrived. The political crisis in a country torn apart by years of civil war has made emergency management fragile, penalized by a lack of structural resources.