The Irish Times view on the floods in Libya: man-made errors amplify a natural disaster

The scene in Derna is apocalyptic. The small town of 100,000 in eastern Libya, perched between steep mountains and the sea, has lost up to a quarter of its land mass. Its buildings, apartments and houses have been swept away with their residents into that sea by the unprecedented tsunami-like floods from the Wadi Derna river and the bursting of two vital retaining dams.

Bodies of 5,000 dead pile up in the streets as the mayor warns that the toll may yet reach 20,000 people. The city’s tiny hospital is completely overwhelmed. Such was the violence of the aftermath of Storm Daniel that one eye witness reported a car wedged on the second-floor balcony of a gutted building.

Rescue efforts are just getting under way, a colossal challenge as the threat of disease from rotting corpses mounts. Rescuing those who can be saved is the immediate priority, a task made far more difficult by the riven country’s two warring governments and the dysfunctional administrations they rule over.

But the question of responsibility must also be addressed – without doubt this “natural” disaster was amplified to cataclysmic proportions by man-made factors. Scientists agree that Storm Daniel itself, the worst to have hit Libya on record, after sweeping devastatingly across Greece, was almost certainly supercharged by climate change.

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And the neglect of Libya’s infrastructure, particularly the vital maintenance on its dams, ensured that its landfall would be particularly lethal. Countless witnesses in the devastated town speak of warnings in recent days to government of cracks in these very dams and others elsewhere in the east of the country. Belatedly pumping has now started to lower water levels.

And last year an expert paper from Libya’s University of Omar Al-Mukhtar on the hydrology of the Wadi Derna Basin highlighted the “high potential for flood risk” on the basis of likely historical flood volumes. The report warned that “the current situation in the Derna valley basin requires officials to take immediate measures, carrying out regular maintenance of the existing dams, because in the event of a huge flood, the result will be disastrous for the residents of the valley and the city”. No action was taken.

The dams, built in the 1970s by Yugoslav engineers, are also believed to have been constructed from dumped and compacted soil or rocks, which is not as strong as concrete.

A commitment on Thursday by both the country’s rival governments – one in Tripoli recognised by the UN, the other headed by renegade general Khalifa Haftar controlling the east, including Derna – to collaborate in rescue efforts is welcome. Whether it materialises, however, remains open to question.