The lack of early-warning services meant that people were unprepared for Storm Daniel and the toll was much higher, said the World Meteorological Organization.
DERNA, Libya - The floods came without warning, sweeping entire neighborhoods off the map and sleeping families out to sea. Five days later, bodies are still floating in a local sports stadium and washing up on the beach.
Some said they had been on the phone to their loved ones Sunday night as the waters rose to their knees, and then to their necks. Outside one hospital, Najiya Shaeri, 52, said her brother-in-law, Fathy, had thrown his daughters from the window to save them as the walls of their home caved in. Shaeri found the girls clinging to the roof of a car. There was no trace of their parents.
“This disaster is of mythic proportions,” he added. “Now, the retrieval of the corpses is important, as is burying the corpses before they disintegrate.” The scale of the disaster was apparent even 85 miles outside Derna, the landscape marked by stagnant floodwaters and clogged fields. Families fleeing the flood zone crawled through traffic in cars caked in red silt; dozens of aid trucks and excavators headed in the opposite direction.
The International Committee for the Red Cross said it had distributed 6,000 body bags across the flood zone to help authorities extend dignified treatment to the dead.
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