As many as 20,000 dead. Hundreds buried at a time in mass graves. Whole neighborhoods swept into the Mediterranean. Tens of thousands— the victims who lived— homeless. And for them, exposed to the elements with everything lost, a struggle to survive.
The straightforward explanation for this frightful tragedy in Libya is that last Sunday, more than 16 inches of rain— that’s a foot-and-a-third— fell in 24 hours. It was too much for an aging dam, high in the mountains above the Mediterranean coast, holding more than four-and-a-half million gallons of water. In the middle of the night the dam burst, and those surging waters breached a second dam downstream with almost four-million gallons more. A wave reportedly 23-feet high swallowed the coastal city of Derna.
The speaker of Libya’s parliament in Tripoli said, “What took place in our country was an incomparable natural disaster,” and it would be easy to leave it at that. The rainfall set a record. The wrath of Mother Nature cannot be tamed. But the human negligence and willful greed that already had crippled Libya cannot be dismissed. The director of the Sadek Institute, a Libyan think tank, said, “This disaster has the hand of man written all over it, and it is stained with their blood.”
It is the hand of man that left the dams so vulnerable. Both were upwards of 50 years old, but according to Derna’s deputy mayor, they hadn’t had maintenance for more than 20 years. Just last year Libya’s Sebha University published a paper warning that the need for upkeep on the dams was urgent, because “in the event of a huge flood, the result will be catastrophic on the residents of the valley and the city.” Funds were allocated to get it done.
But in a nation ruled by two rival governments that have been perpetually at war— one based in Tripoli, the other in Benghazi— the funds were never spent, at least not where they were supposed to be spent. The dams were disasters waiting to happen.
It is also the hand of man that left Libya’s meteorological agency so bereft. In the absence of a single central government, there was an incautious lack of preparation for the predictable storm that was crossing the Mediterranean from southern Europe. Warnings were issued, but they didn’t begin to give anyone the scope of what could happen. “The weather conditions were not studied well,” according to a spokesman for Libya’s Emergency and Ambulance Service who spoke with CNN, “there was no evacuation of families that could be in the path of the storm and in valleys.” The head of the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization echoed that assessment. “If there would have been a normally operating meteorological service,” he told a news conference, “they would have issued the warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people and we would have avoided most of the human casualties.”
But it never happened.
Arguably, too, it was the hand of man that compounded the climate that caused the savage storm. There is broad consensus among climate scientists that because of climate change, both the frequency and intensity of storms has grown. Witness the hurricanes that have been battering the southeastern U.S.. Witness the rainfall that has flooded the northeast. But much of the world has failed to take measures to reverse this existential trend.
Libya was an unparalleled natural disaster, made worse by the hand of man. As foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor at The Washington Post put it, “There’s plenty of blame to go around.”
There’s been blame to go around for decades, because Libya has been in crisis for decades— man-made crises. When I occasionally covered the country during the rule of Moammar Gaddafi, the crisis was authoritarianism, and its legacy plagues Libya to this day. Citizens dared not dissent from the policies and philosophies of Gaddafi’s “Green Book”— modeled after the “Little Red Book” of Mao Tse-tung— for fear of execution or imprisonment.
I once reported on its premise, Gaddafi’s ill-considered attempt at utopian egalitarianism. He forbade anyone from taking leadership of anything even as innocuous as scout troops or PTAs. He allowed what he called Basic People’s Congresses, but they didn’t make a move without his consent. Gaddafi alone made every decision that mattered. What this left in its wake was a nation woefully unprepared to run itself after he was gone.
In 2011, that’s what happened. Gaddafi was overthrown, captured, and killed. But what replaced him was no better. A civil war broke out, with nations from the Gulf to Europe to Russia choosing sides, some of them eventually fighting proxy wars with one another. Libya ended up not just with a fractured government but with a fractured infrastructure. The destruction of Derna is one result.
And now the hand of man is still an obstacle in the wake of the flood. Because many nations have supported the Libyan government that operates from Tripoli— which is a thousand miles from Derna— the other Libyan government in Benghazi, which is closer, has not cleared the way for some relief agencies to work in the flood zone. Algeria, which shares its long eastern border with Libya, sides with the Tripoli government and won’t even deliver its aid to where it’s needed. Equally troubling, there is little confidence among some who are trying to help that what they send will find its way to the people whose lives now depend on it.
The natural disaster that hit Libya last Sunday is, as the parliament’s speaker said, incomparable. But greedy rivalries that put politicians’ power above people’s welfare, are not. They are almost common. Libya is just the latest case.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
So sad. I understand Libya was once a delightful place to visit and learn. All that nature could wreak and a corrupt king whose every whim overrules anything the elected members of government propose. It boggles the mind.
Thank you Greg. I had not read this backstory anywhere. Yours is a very helpful guide to an otherwise inexplicable horror.