2023-09-22 12:34:59
About ten days ago, the port of Derna still welcomed fishing boats and merchant ships. The floods that devastated this town in eastern Libya transformed it into a dump filled with debris and corpses.
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The port has emptied of its workers, fishermen and onlookers, and few ships dock there anymore. Only local and international search and rescue teams are active on site, trying to recover what lies at the bottom of the port basin.
One of these ships, the tug Irasa, was in the waters of the port on the night of September 10, when storm Daniel caused the collapse of two dams, causing floods which swept entire neighborhoods into the waters. of the Mediterranean.
According to a provisional official report communicated by the authorities in the east of the country plagued by political divisions, these floods have caused more than 3,300 deaths, and searches continue to try to find thousands of people missing.
“No visibility”
At dawn, he took the full measure of the disaster: there were “trucks, tires, people, houses, palm trees (…), refrigerators”. Many personal items still litter the platform.
The head of the Ports Authority’s crisis committee, Captain Mohamed Chalibta, explains that searches are continuing to find “objects washed up in the port”, and says he expects to find people “inside their vehicles which sank.
“Each area of the port is assigned to a specific team,” he adds.
An Emirati team takes charge of one of the sectors. She arrived with her equipment, including boats and Jet-skis, and began inspections by diving and palpation, because there is “no visibility” in the mud-filled water, divers noted.
From their yellow boat, four Emirati divers carrying oxygen tanks descend in pairs, secured by ropes. Shortly following, one of them came back up to announce: “we tied the rope to a car. We can’t see anything.” A second diver discovers another car.
A crane is mobilized to extract one of the two vehicles.
A Libyan team specializing in the handling of corpses, dressed in white overalls, approaches to inspect its contents, and finally announces that no body is there.
The work of recovering objects lying at the bottom of the port basin, or even further out at sea, promises to be laborious.
Meanwhile, rescue efforts continue at sea along the coast of the stricken city, where many bodies have been carried away by currents further east.
Woman in a refrigerator
“It is easier to take care of a corpse at sea than on land, because the salinity level acts as an insulator on the skin,” says Libyan team leader Hafez Obaid, referring to security risks. divers.
Mr. Al-Mismari relates how fishermen on “private fishing boats were the first” to come to the aid of survivors.
Informed of the passage of the storm, he saw his tug “trembling in an unusual and unprecedented way” around 2:30 a.m.
At his side, Taoufik Akrouch, a 61-year-old technician, says that “the water level had risen more than a meter and a half above the quay with the arrival of a large number of machines”.
The sudden tilt of the ship, hit by floodwaters, forced its crew to start the engines and cut the ropes to move away from the dock.
In the early morning, the crew was alerted by distress calls. It was a naked old woman taking refuge in a refrigerator floating on the surface. “Where is my sister?” implored this woman who had miraculously survived, according to the story of the two sailors.
Later, the crew rescued an Egyptian who said he “found himself here following falling asleep”, or perhaps because he had “lost consciousness”, relates the captain.
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