9/14/23, 1:45 PM Why is the flooding in Libya so deadly?

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Aging dams and missed warnings: A lethal mix of factors

caused Africa’s deadliest flood disaster
By Nadeen Ebrahim and Laura Paddison, CNN
Updated 1:03 PM EDT, Thu September 14, 2023

Maxar Technologies/Reuters

A satellite image shows the town of Derna in the aftermath of the floods in eastern Libya on Wednesday.

(CNN) — It started with a bang at 3 a.m. Monday as the residents of Derna were sleeping.
One dam burst, then a second, sending a huge wave of water gushing down through the
mountains towards the coastal Libyan city, killing thousands as entire neighborhoods were
swept into the sea.

At least 8,000 people in Libya have been killed by this week’s floods, Doctors Without
Borders (Médecins sans frontières) said in a statement Thursday, in the deadliest flooding
disaster in Africa since records began more than a century ago.

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The eastern Libyan city of Derna, the epicenter of the disaster, had a population of around
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100,000 before the tragedy. Authorities say that at least 10,000 remain missing. CNN could
not independently verify the figures.

RELATED GALLERY
In photos: Catastrophic flooding devastates eastern Libya

GALLERY

Buildings, homes and infrastructure were “wiped out” when a 7-meter (23-foot) wave hit
the city, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which said
Thursday that dead bodies were now washing back up on shore.

But with thousands killed and many more still missing, there are questions as to why the
storm that also hit Greece and other countries caused so much more devastation in Libya.

Experts say that apart from the strong storm itself, Libya’s catastrophe was greatly
exacerbated by a lethal confluence of factors including aging, crumbling infrastructure,
inadequate warnings and the impacts of the accelerating climate crisis.

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A ferocious storm
The extreme rainfall that hit Libya on Sunday was brought by a system called Storm Daniel.

After sweeping Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria, with severe flooding that killed more than 20
people, it formed into a “medicane” over the Mediterranean – a relatively rare type of storm
with similar characteristics to hurricanes and typhoons.

The medicane strengthened as it crossed the unusually warm waters of the Mediterranean
before dumping torrential rain on Libya on Sunday.

It brought more than 16 inches (414 mm) of rainfall in 24 hours to Al-Bayda, a city west of
Derna, a new record.

While it’s too early to definitively attribute the storm to the climate crisis, scientists are
confident that climate change is increasing the intensity of extreme weather events like
storms. Warmer oceans provide fuel for storms to grow, and a warmer atmosphere can hold
more moisture, meaning more extreme rainfall.

Storms “are becoming more ferocious because of climate change,” said Hannah Cloke,
professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the UK.

A history of flooding
Derna is prone to flooding, and its dam reservoirs have caused at least five deadly floods
since 1942, the latest of which was in 2011, according to a research paper published by
Libya’s Sebha University last year.

The two dams that burst on Monday were built around half a century ago, between 1973
and 1977 by a Yugoslav construction company The Derna dam is 75 meters (246 feet) high
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and 1977, by a Yugoslav construction company. The Derna dam is 75 meters (246 feet) high
with a storage capacity of 18 million cubic meters
RELATED (4.76 billion gallons). The second dam,

Mansour, is 45 meters (148 feet) high with a capacity of 1.5 million cubic meters (396
million gallons).

Those dams haven’t undergone maintenance since 2002, the city’s deputy mayor Ahmed
Madroud told Al Jazeera.

But the problems with the dams were known. The Sebha University paper warned that the
dams in Derna had a “high potential for flood risk” and that periodic maintenance is needed
to avoid “catastrophic” flooding.

PLANET LABS PBC/AP

Satellite images show Derna, Libya on September 2, before the flooding, left, and after the dams collapsed, right.

“The current situation in the Wadi Derna reservoir requires officials to take immediate
measures to carry out periodic maintenance of existing dams,” the paper recommended
last year. “Because in the event of a huge flood, the result will be catastrophic on the
residents of the valley and the city.” It also found that the surrounding area lacked adequate
vegetation that could prevent soil erosion. Residents of the area should be made aware of
the dangers of flooding, it added.

Liz Stephens, Professor in Climate Risks and Resilience at the University of Reading in the
United Kingdom, told CNN that there were serious questions to be asked about the design
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standard of the dam and whether the risk of very extreme rainfall events had been
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adequately taken into account.

“It’s very clear that without this dam break, we wouldn’t have seen the tragic number of
fatalities that that have happened as a result,” she said.

“The dams would have held back the water initially, with their failure potentially releasing all
the water in one go,” Stephens also told Science Media Center, adding that “the debris
caught up in the floodwaters would have added to the destructive power.”

Derna has been battered in the past, its infrastructure upended by years of fighting.

From battling ISIS and then later, eastern commander Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National
Army (LNA), the city’s infrastructure has crumbled and is woefully inadequate in the face of
floods like the one brought by on by Storm Daniel.

A lack of warnings
Better warnings could have avoided most of the casualties in Derna, the head of the United
Nations’ World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, said.

“If there would have been a normally operating meteorological service, 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,” Taalas told reporters at a news conference Thursday.

Talaas added that the political instability in the country has impeded WMO efforts to work
with the Libyan government to improve these systems.

Yet, even robust early warning systems are not a guarantee that all lives can be saved, said
Cloke.

RELATED ARTICLE
Most deaths in Libya floods could have been avoided, UN says, as fears grow for
thousands missing

Dam failures can be very hard to forecast, and are fast and ferocious, she told CNN. “You
have this monstrous volume of water just taking out the city entirely,” Cloke said. “It’s one
of the worst types of floods that ever happens.”

While dams are usually designed to withstand relatively extreme events, it’s often not
enough said Cloke “We should be preparing for unexpected events and then you put
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enough, said Cloke. We should be preparing for unexpected events, and then you put
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climate change on top, and that ramps up these unexpected events.”

The risk climate-fueled extreme weather poses to infrastructure – not just dams, but
everything from buildings to water supplies – is a global one. “We’re not ready for the
extreme events coming towards us,” Cloke said.

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