Libya floods: What left Derna vulnerable to catastrophic damage?

A country often at war with itself neglected infrastructure and an unprecedented storm was a recipe for disaster in dharna the Wadi River only periodically swells and floods the dams built 50 years ago above derna were the solutions but Libyan news in 2020 reported on heavy rains that destroyed roads

The infrastructure is really weak said one man consecutive governments have neglected this said another what few seem to have foreseen is that the dams themselves could fail catastrophically from one storm the storm first gathered strength over the warm Waters of the Mediterranean and then turned Eastward over Libya’s jibel

Akhtar mountains a region that normally gets about one millimeter of rain in all of September received 400 millimeters in 24 hours the upper dam was breached by more than a million cubic meters of water water rushed toward the lower M which held back 22 million cubic meters

Of water the second Dam failed and Torrance racing downhill some three meters deep wiped out whatever was in its way it has something that we’d never seen before we were not used to this incident we were not expecting it that way Libya was not expecting it but a

Warmer atmosphere and oceans are forcing new expectations everywhere from medicains slamming North Africa to atmospheric rivers in the Pacific to hurricanes persisting through the North Atlantic as the atmosphere warms up it just can hold more water vapor and if you’re close to an ocean which is warm

As well that just doubles or amplifies the amount of water vapor and the intensity of the storms Kent Moore says Coastal communities in Canada and around the world must prepare for what’s coming and not treat these new extremes as normal it’s not normal to get three

Months worth of rain in a day a lot of infrastructure dams uh you know roads all those things will have to be re-engineered to deal with these new extremes because they haven’t frankly been designed for the level of extreme events that we’re seeing now and of

Course what we’ll see in the future what happened in Libya and what’s bearing down on Atlantic Canada this weekend are not dissimilar extreme weather events that climate change is bringing with more intensity and more frequency Eric Sorensen Global News Toronto

More than 11,000 lives were lost in Derna, Libya, earlier this week after the city flooded.

Dams built 50 years ago in Derna were the country’s solution to floods, however, a lack of maintenance left residents vulnerable to floods for decades.

Libya officials say they were not expecting the level of water they did, while locals claim the dam was neglected for years.

Global’s Eric Sorenson details how Storm Daniel ultimately exposed the fragility of Libya’s dam and resulted in a tragedy of this scale.

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