As Derna reels, other flood-hit Libyan cities struggle to recover

Susa, Libya – AFP

As much of the world’s attention has been focused on the port city of Derna since flooding in eastern Libya, other cities are mired in the resulting damage.

Ahmed Saleh, a 34-year-old civil engineer clad in a traditional white jalabiya, is still in shock at the scale of the destruction in his home city, Susa.

He says they still have great difficulty accessing drinking water after a desalination plant was badly damaged.

Volunteers “bring water from nearby cities in big trucks. That’s a big problem for us”.

Though the casualties in Susa were not as high as those in Derna, the tsunami-size September 10 storm razed the city’s summerhouses, or “chalets” as they are known there, and left electric grids and roads in disrepair.

Local officials say the floods killed 19 people in Susa.

Abdelhakim Bachir, the head of the mayor’s office in Susa, said reconstruction was the absolute priority.

“We need to restore all the infrastructure. We didn’t have electricity for three days and now we still don’t have water,” he told AFP.

Before the flood, the desalination plant by the coast provided water to 320,000 people in Susa and the nearby cities of Al-Bayda and Cyrene.

Milad Saleh, a worker at the plant, said that when the disaster hit, there was complete chaos.

“On the first night there was a blackout, we couldn’t see anything. Pipes were blocked by wood, rocks and mud,” the 63-year-old said.

“At the moment we’re working as hard as we can to clean the water plant,” he added.

The plant’s director, Ezz El-Gedri, said it would take at least a week to be able to restart the machines.

“For now, we are checking each piece of equipment to see what works or what needs to be repaired or replaced.”

Susa, about 60 kilometres (38 miles) west of Derna, is a local tourism spot on the Mediterranean coast famed for its beachfront chalets and sea rock formations.

“Between 20 and 25 chalets were entirely or partially destroyed in the touristic quarter,” Bachir said.

Cyrene

In the nearby city of Cyrene, home to the ancient UNESCO-listed ruins of the same name, the rain sent boulders tumbling down the nearby Jabal al-Akhdar mountain range.

Water from the sewerage system now circulates around the ruins, threatening their foundations.

An AFP team saw bubbling water pooling around the ancient site, releasing a foul odour into the air.

Officials fear that the wastewater could damage the columns of the monuments, which include the second century AD Temple of Zeus, bigger than the Parthenon in Athens.

‘It’s all lost’

The floods also severely damaged the farms in eastern Libya, where the only arable land is located along the Mediterranean coast.

In Marawa, about 65 kilometres (40 miles) south of Al-Bayda, 29-year-old Salem Fadhel laments the loss of his annual harvest.

“It is a complete catastrophe… we were about to sell our products,” he said.

“It is all lost now,” he continued, pointing to a plot of lettuce now mired in muddy soil.

“The floods covered all the lettuce plants. Around 60 farms were completely lost,” he said.

Efforts to rebuild have been severely complicated by the collapse of the roads leading into the town.

“We have electricity but our roads are not usable anymore,” Fawzi al-Barassi, 27, said.

‘Beyond description’

“The crisis is huge. It’s beyond description,” Faraj El-Hassi, the head of the health programme at the Libyan Red Crescent, told AFP in Benghazi.

He said 17 cities or towns were damaged by the floods.

“We had huge experience… when it comes to handling armed conflict or other crises over the past 10 years,” he said.

But he confessed that the aid organisation was now “over capacity” given the numbers of casualties, despite his team working around the clock to offer care.

“We don’t have the rescue equipment, we don’t have the vehicles to move,” he said, appealing for “efforts and support from all over the world”.

“It is not a crisis that we can manage alone.”