Libyan city counts toll of huge flood, 10,000 missing

Libya’s eastern city of Derna was counting its dead Wednesday with 2,300 people confirmed killed in devastating flash floods unleashed by Storm Daniel and the Red Cross warning that 10,000 are missing.

Two river dams burst after the storm hit on Sunday afternoon, releasing an enormous surge of water that tore through the Mediterranean coastal city, sweeping away buildings and the people inside them.

By late Tuesday, the confirmed death toll from emergency services in the politically fractured North African country was at least 2,300, although some officials were quoted as giving figures more than twice as high.

Another 10,000 people were still missing, said Tamer Ramadan of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

“The death toll is huge and might reach thousands,” Ramadan said. “We don’t have a definite number right now,” he said on Tuesday, stressing though that the organization had independent sources saying “the number of missing people is hitting 10,000 persons so far”.

Media reports quoted a spokesman for the interior ministry of Libya’s eastern-based government as saying “more than 5,200” people had died in Derna.

The city of Derna, a 300-kilometer drive east of Benghazi, is ringed by hills and bisected by what is normally a dry riverbed in summer, but which became a raging torrent of mud-brown water that also swept away several major bridges.

Derna was home to about 100,000 people, and many of its multi-story buildings on the banks of the riverbed collapsed, with people, their homes and cars vanishing in the raging waters.