Libya’s deadly dam collapse was decades in the making

With thousands of people dead and tens of thousands more left homeless by floods as a storm burst through the dams next to the east Libyan city of Derna, FRANCE 24 looks back at the years of violence and neglect that left the city ill-prepared for the unprecedented natural disasters of the climate crisis.

Issued on: 13/09/2023 

Scientists say the Mediterranean storm that dumped torrential rain on the Libyan coast is just the latest extreme weather event to carry some hallmarks of climate change. © Jamal Alkomaty, AP

By:Paul MILLAR

Towards dawn on Monday, September 11, the waters of the Wadi Derna river burst through the dams that had been built to hold them at bay. Swollen with unheard-of rainfall dragged across the Mediterranean by Storm Daniel, the river crashed through the coastal city of Derna in Libya’s east, killing thousands of people and leaving entire neighbourhoods in ruins. Members of the country’s eastern administration have put the death toll at more than 5,000 people, with 10,000 more still missing. Dozens of bodies continue to wash up along the coast. 

Liz Stephens, a professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading’s Department of Meteorology, said that the dams' collapse had been catastrophic.

“While Storm Daniel brought exceptional rainfall totals to eastern Libya, the tragic loss of life will have been largely due to the failure of dams, with a sudden release of water providing little time to reach safety, and the entrained debris adding to the violent force of the floodwaters,” she told FRANCE 24.

‘The consequences will be disastrous’

The two Wadi Derna dams were built between 1973 and 1977 by Yugoslav construction company Hidrotehnika-Hidroenergetika, now based in Serbia, as part of an infrastructure network that would irrigate surrounding fields while supplying Derna and nearby communities with much-needed water. The two dams, dubbed Derna and Mansour, are described on the company’s site as clay-filled embankment dams with a height of 75 metres and 45 metres respectively. The Derna dam’s storage capacity is listed as 18 million cubic meters of water, while the smaller Mansour dam has a capacity of just 1.5 million cubic meters. 

A research paper published in November 2022 by Omar al-Mukhtar University hydrologist Abdelwanees A. R Ashoor warned that the dams holding back the seasonal waterway – known as a wadi – needed urgent attention, citing a number of floods that had repeatedly struck the river basin since WWII. 

“The results that were obtained demonstrate that the studied area is at risk of flooding,” he wrote. “Therefore, immediate measures must be taken for routine maintenance of the dams, because in the event of a big flood, the consequences will be disastrous for the residents of the valley and the city.”

But Derna Deputy Mayor Ahmed Madroud told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that the dams had not been properly cared for in more than two decades.

“The dams have not been maintained since 2002, and they are not big,” he said.

“When the river overflowed its banks, then it just took all the buildings with it, and the families that were in it.”

Stephens, from the University of Reading, said that closer monitoring of the dams could have proved vital.

“It is too early to determine whether the failure of the dam was caused by a lack of maintenance or whether it was not designed to be resilient to the exceptional amount of rainfall that fell,” she said. “Monitoring of the condition of the dam could have perhaps supported early warning of potential failure, and precautionary evacuations of the people in harm's way.”

Although Stephens stressed that it was still unclear to what extent even a well-maintained dam of the same proportions could have withstood the hurricane-strength storm’s onslaught, she said that such extreme weather events would only become more common as the climate crisis worsened. 

“Without the dams in place the impacts of the flooding would have been far less catastrophic, but such infrastructure is needed to enable consistent water supply in semi-arid regions such as this,” she said. “This infrastructure needs to be designed to withstand even the rarest of events, and we need to find a way to estimate what magnitudes of rainfall are physically plausible in our changing climate.”

Asma Khalifa, the co-founder of peace-building organisation the Khalifa Ihler Institute and a doctoral researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, argued that decades of government neglect and political conflict in Libya played a large part in the dams’ deterioration.

Source :https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20230913-libya-s-deadly-dam-collapse-was-decades-in-the-making