Ahmed Saleh, a 34-year-old civil engineer clad in a traditional white jalabiya, is still in shock at the scale of the destruction in his home city, Susa.
More than 10 days after the deadly storms lashed eastern Libya, he says they still have great difficulty accessing drinking water after a desalination plant was badly damaged.
Volunteers "bring water from nearby cities in big trucks. That's a big problem for us".
Though the casualties in Susa were not as high as those in Derna, the tsunami-size September 10 storm razed the city's summerhouses, or "chalets" as they are known there, and left electric grids and roads in disrepair.
Local officials say the floods killed 19 people in Susa.
Abdelhakim Bachir, the head of the mayor's office in Susa, said reconstruction was the absolute priority.
"We need to restore all the infrastructure. We didn't have electricity for three days and now we still don't have water," he told AFP.
- No water -
Before the flood, the desalination plant by the coast provided water to 320,000 people in Susa and the nearby cities of Al-Bayda and Cyrene.
Milad Saleh, a worker at the plant, said that when the disaster hit, there was complete chaos.
"On the first night there was a blackout, we couldn't see anything. Pipes were blocked by wood, rocks and mud," the 63-year-old said.
"At the moment we're working as hard as we can to clean the water plant," he added.
The plant's director, Ezz El-Gedri, said it would take at least a week to be able to restart the machines.
"For now, we are checking each piece of equipment to see what works or what needs to be repaired or replaced."
Susa, about 60 kilometres (38 miles) west of Derna, is a local tourism spot on the Mediterranean coast famed for its beachfront chalets and sea rock formations.
"Between 20 and 25 chalets were entirely or partially destroyed in the touristic quarter," Bachir said.
In the nearby city of Cyrene, home to the ancient UNESCO-listed ruins of the same name, the rain sent boulders tumbling down the nearby Jabal al-Akhdar mountain range.
Water from the sewage system now circulates around the ruins, threatening their foundations.
An AFP team saw bubbling water pooling around the ancient site, releasing a foul odour into the air.
Officials fear that the wastewater could damage the columns of the monuments, which include the second century AD Temple of Zeus, bigger than the Parthenon in Athens.
- 'It's all lost'-
The floods also severely damaged the farms in eastern Libya, where the only arable land is located along the Mediterranean coast.
In Marawa, about 65 kilometres (40 miles) south of Al-Bayda, 29-year-old Salem Fadhel laments the loss of his annual harvest.
"It is a complete catastrophe... we were about to sell our products," he said.
"It is all lost now," he continued, pointing to a plot of lettuce now mired in muddy soil.
"The floods covered all the lettuce plants. Around 60 farms were completely lost," he said.
Efforts to rebuild have been severely complicated by the collapse of the roads leading into the town, which has obstructed rescue teams and ambulances trying to arrive.
"We have electricity but our roads are not usable anymore," Fawzi al-Barassi, 27, said.
Rujab Abdelmollah al-Barassi said the town was in need of a hospital.
"We need to renovate the hospital, we need better medical infrastructure," he said.
"There were a lot of promises by the authorities even before the catastrophe, but nothing never changed in Marawa."
- 'Over capacity'-
The North African nation has been in turmoil for more than a decade since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising led to the overthrow and killing of veteran dictator Moamer Kadhafi.
The country's flood-hit east is ruled by an administration backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.
The floods killed over 3,000 in Derna, according to the eastern administration, but international groups fear the eventual count will be far higher.
"The crisis is huge. It's beyond description," Faraj El-Hassi, the head of the health programme at the Libyan Red Crescent, told AFP in Benghazi.
He said 17 cities or towns were damaged by the floods.
"We had huge experience... when it comes to handling armed conflict or other crises over the past 10 years," he said.
But he confessed that the aid organisation was now "over capacity" given the numbers of casualties, despite his team working around the clock to offer care.
"We don't have the rescue equipment, we don't have the vehicles to move," he said, appealing for "efforts and support from all over the world".
"It is not a crisis that we can manage alone."
Eastern authorities want Libya aid conference in flood-hit Derna
Benghazi, Libya (AFP) Sept 23, 2023 -
Libya's flood-devastated port city of Derna will host an international conference next month to aid reconstruction efforts, authorities in the east of the divided country said Friday.
There was no immediate reaction from the internationally recognised government in Tripoli nor any details on how the rival administration would accommodate delegates in a city where entire neighbourhoods have been swept away.
A tsunami-sized flash flood broke through two ageing dams upstream from Derna after a hurricane-strength storm lashed the area on September 10, sweeping thousands of people into the sea.
"The government invites the international community to participate in the conference planned for October 10 in Derna to present modern, rapid projects for the reconstruction of the city," the eastern administration said in a statement.
It said the conference was being held in "response to the demands of residents of the stricken city of Derna and other towns that suffered damage" during the flooding.
Despite a wave of nationwide solidarity since the flood, there was no immediate show of support for the proposed conference from the Tripoli-based government of interim Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah.
And even the office of strongman Khalifa Haftar, the main military backer of the eastern administration, questioned how many donor governments would attend.
"Are donor countries going to take part or are they going to wait for a conference organised by Dbeibah?" Haftar's spokesman Ahmad al-Mismari asked. "This political polarisation has harmed Libyans."
Libya has been wracked by division and on-off conflict ever since a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed veteran dictator Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.
A bloody 2019 assault on Tripoli by Haftar's forces ended in defeat by Dbeibah loyalists and an August 2020 ceasefire that largely holds.
- Mass burials -
There is still no widely accepted death toll for the floods which devastated Derna and nearby coastal towns.
The latest official death toll released on Friday evening stood at 3,753 but the eventual count is expected to be far higher, with international aid groups giving estimates of up to 10,000 people missing.
Bodies are still being found in large numbers, under the debris or on beaches where they have washed up after being swept out to the sea by the flood.
On Friday, dozens of bodies were delivered in a lorry and two pick-ups to the village cemetery in Martouba, 27 kilometres (17 miles) southeast of Derna, for burial, footage posted on social media showed.
Libyan media said 200 people were buried in the cemetery in a single day.
The International Organization for Migration said Thursday that more than 43,000 people have been displaced from the disaster zone.
It said a "lack of water supply is reportedly driving many displaced out of Derna".
In Susa, about 60 kilometres (40 miles) to the west, residents complained that they too had no access to drinking water after the flood badly damaged a desalination plant.
Instead, volunteers have to "bring water from nearby cities in big trucks," 34-year-old Ahmed Saleh told AFP.
Mobile and internet services were restored in Derna on Thursday following a two-day disruption that came after demonstrations by angry residents on Monday.
The protests saw hundreds of demonstrators gather outside the city's grand mosque, chanting slogans against the eastern-based parliament and its leader and calling for accountability over the high death toll.
Amnesty International reported "arrests of critics and protesters" in Derna and criticised "efforts to choreograph and control media access".
The dams that burst had developed cracks as far back as the 1990s, Libya's top prosecutor has said, as residents accused authorities of negligence.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group said in a report issued on Tuesday that a deluge of the magnitude seen in eastern Libya was an event that occurred once every 300-600 years.
They said such downpours were both more likely and heavier because of human-caused global warming, resulting in up to 50 percent more rain.
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