report
They thought they would be safe in the mountains: But the flood disaster has also destroyed entire villages in eastern Libya. Desperate relatives remain behind.
While the excavators are making noise outside to push the piles of rubble aside, inside the house it is completely quiet. The picture with a surah from the Koran – may Allah bring blessings – still hangs above the entrance.
A week ago the water was almost up to the ceiling here. All that’s left is the red mud. Centimeters thick it covers the once beautiful carpet in the living room, every corner of the house, all the furniture is washed up and lying on the floor in a senseless mess. In between: the bright red front wheel of a children’s bicycle. Not long ago the world was fine here. The mother and her three children drowned in the floods.
“We were able to save ourselves by jumping out the window”
“The water came all of a sudden,” reports Mohammed. He is one of the family’s neighbors in the village of Wardeah in eastern Libya. “It shot into the valley. I was only able to save my family and myself because we jumped out of the window and then ran up the mountain.”
Mohammed now has a washed-up tree in the living room. He points to a pile of metal pieces – apparently an old bed frame – lying in the middle of the large open space in the village. “We found the neighboring family’s baby here,” he says sadly.
Only a few loose bricks remind us of the neighboring house on the other side – the rest, the entire building including its residents, was simply washed away. A shoe lies in the middle of the mud – in a place that was once a home.
There are many destroyed and completely muddy cars in the villages.
Danger came from the mountains
“My brother-in-law came here to the mountains from the coast with his family,” says Mohammed. “They thought they would be safe here from the storm.”
But the danger came from the mountains, not the sea. Even outside the most affected city of Darna, people have lost their homes in the floods following heavy rains. Their fate is shocking, and many of the residents fear for their existence.
Incubators and incubators dry outdoors
A few kilometers from Mohammed’s home in the neighboring town of Bayada, everyone gets involved. The floods came here too, and no one has a home here anymore. Families stand in front of every house, pick memorabilia out of the dirt and clear the mud from the apartments.
Any help is welcome, especially at the local hospital. The water was up to the ceiling in the modern treatment rooms – miraculously no one was being treated on the night in question, there was only damage to property. But these are immense – incubators, incubators for newborns and treatment tables are now drying outside. Much of it equipped with modern technology, now caked with mud.
Everyone pitches in: In Bayada, a resident helps carry the equipment out of the hospital and outside.
Girl died of scorpion bite – antidote lay in the rubble
“We have to clean everything first and then check what still works,” says villager Ibrahim. “Otherwise we have to get it repaired. We have no water, no electricity, and our cars were destroyed by the flood.”
When will they have a hospital again? Ibrahim shrugs his shoulders. Until then, they have to travel far for medical treatment – to the nearest town. If they can drive. A little girl died last week – a few days after the flood, he says. “She was bitten by a scorpion.” The antidote would still be somewhere here, in the rubble of the destroyed hospital. Any help came too late for the child.