The storm and accompanying floods this week that have killed thousands in Libya was a natural disaster, likely compounded by climate change. But the magnitude of loss in Libya is inherently political — the failure of a divided, corrupt, and autocratic government of the past decade that was hastily built around Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s decentralized state and has been impeded by civil war.
At least 5,300 people have died and potentially thousands more are missing after torrential rain and catastrophic flooding occurred in Storm Daniel’s wake. The country’s eastern coastal city of Derna has suffered tremendously, with reports suggesting that about a quarter of it washed away after two dams collapsed. More than 34,000 people have been displaced. The city remains without phone lines or electricity, so the scale of the destruction could be higher. “We join the Libyan people in grieving the loss of too many lives cut short, and send our hope to all those missing loved ones,” President Joe Biden said in a statement.
“All of us are affected,” Anas El Gomati, founder of the Libyan think tank Sadeq Institute, told me. “The city was destroyed by climate change, that I can accept. But the people that are under the rubble today are because of man’s evil, and there is no other way to describe it.”
Storm Daniel, called a “medicane” for its origin in the Mediterranean and its resemblance to hurricanes, swept through North Africa. But unlike the earthquake that struck Morocco recently, storms can be predicted. There were three days of advance notice in which Libyan leaders could have ordered evacuations of cities and prepared for rescue crews.
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