‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/13/libya-flood-death-toll

by perihelions • 3 years ago

127 125 3 years ago

totetsu2• 3 years ago

When ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi. I know that’s kind of a knee jerk reaction, but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?

_ph_• 3 years ago

My impression is, that Libya is at least split into two major factions and as they are bound in their internal conflict there is no international politic any more. Which conveniently allowed the west to mostly forget about Libya.

I saw a heartbreaking report about the disaster region yesterday. One interesting aspect were hints that this disaster might have stimulated more cooperation inside Libya. May be this is a starting point for sorting out their internal political problems. I would really wish it to the people of Libya.

sokoloff2• 3 years ago

The US experienced a significant unifying force 22 years and 4 days ago. The effect was very clearly only temporary.

jiofj• 3 years ago

Why is it a knee-jerk reaction to think that the NATO shouldn't meddle with the politics of other countries?

totetsu2• 3 years ago

I mean that I haven’t kept up to date with the situation there, and I don’t know if in the past this region and this dam were administered any better or not. I’m just assuming that the NATO intervention and the fracturing of the country into civil wars is to blame here.

PedroBatista2• 3 years ago

The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi.

If the "alternate reality" didn't already erased it, you may recall something called "Arab Spring". It's not like Gaddafi was in a stable position at the time, and even less likely he would skate the whole situation until today.

Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the rebellion in Benghazi and enforced a no-fly zone otherwise Gaddafi's planes would obliterate the rebel forces and the civilians living in those cities ( which started to happen, before the EU and US moved their asses ). Speaking of "assassinations", I don't think Gaddafi's forces would punish the offenders with only a slap on the wrist. Do I need to mention the shipping containers with bullet holes in the Sun at the desert full of prisoners?

Everyone's "performance" has been bad, but why don't we talk about Syria/Russia dealings in Libya in the last ~5 years? which coincidentally have been the worse and more unstable years since the 2011 war? ( Not to mention the usual bottom feeders of doom that appear in these situations, ie. the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and every other "entrepreneur" group funded by the bored Sheiks in the Arabian Peninsula?

mcv4• 3 years ago

Exactly. If the EU and US hadn't stopped Gaddafi from killing his own people, the tragedy would also have been terrible. Worse than now? Better than now? Should they have known? It's impossible to say.

thriftwy5• 3 years ago

EU/US has supported a rebellion in Lybia (equals created a rebellion in Lybia) and then used direct military force to topple Lybian regime.

I'm not even sure who administered the city which was crushed by the flood in 2023 considering the free-for-all in Lybia ever since.

As usual with Western-induced rebellions, everybody ended up losing. I'm also not sure why you are confident that Gaffafi was going to "obliterate the civilians" (read - his own citizens).

themgt2• 3 years ago

The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi.

Right. "We came, we saw, he died! [lol]"

This is just revisionist nonsense. There was no "full on" civil war in Libya until NATO intervened and turned it into such. This video [1] (from 9 years ago) does a good job laying out the counterargument - the US took the opportunity of a small-scale uprising to regime change Gaddafi and plunged the country into now a decade of chaos and destruction with no end in sight, destabilizing most of North Africa and flooding Europe with refugees in the process.

Everyone's "performance" has been bad, but why don't we talk about Syria/Russia/[Al-Qaeda] dealings in Libya in the last ~5 years?

Why don't we talk about how the US illegally invaded Syria, allied itself with Al-Qaeda offshoots and tried to topple another antagonist Ba'athist government, failed, and plunged that country also into now an effectively permanent low-level civil war? Why is it the US and NATO can invade and bomb and occupy the territory of anyone they want by claiming "their leaders are bad" but if anyone else does it to our friends (many of whom are also bad) it's all "territorial integrity" and "national sovereignty" and "the rules based order"?

Because our foreign policy is run by utter amoral hypocrites and liars. We are the flailing, declining hegemon, leaving a path of destruction in our wake. And in cases like Syria or Libya its hard to avoid the conclusion our perspective is "if we can't have it we'll settle for wrecking it".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH3D-sOLpHE

kranke155• 3 years ago

The UK Parliamentary report on the Lybian intervention kind of refutes some of your points. Worth reading

1. Gaddafi was talking about war crimes but didn’t commit them in reality

objektif2• 3 years ago

I cannot believe I am actually reading this. What kind of god syndrome people have here to think that they can just play Age of Empires with real people? You know you are talking about a sovereign nation right?

CapricornNoble3• 3 years ago

You said it yourself, he was well on his way to crushing the rebellion. Libya's Arab Spring might have ended like Bahrain's [1], in which case the country might still have one of the highest levels of development in Africa.[2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/05/144637499/bahrain-the-revolut...

[2] https://www.countercurrents.org/cramer040511.htm

f6v4• 3 years ago

The fact there’s a civil war doesn’t give you a right to invade a country. Or does it? I’m confused, it’s always a different answer.

lenkite4• 3 years ago

Why don't we talk about how Obama's "moderate rebels" in Syria metasized into ISIS with full U.S equipment. After in-effectiveness in Syria against battle hardened Assad forces, they decided to go for Mosul and the soft Iraqi forces instead. Believe there was even an interview with the ISIS soldiers where they were very happy with the U.S. sponsorship!

The same story was repeated earlier with Bin Laden. It is like the U.S. never learns. Now once again in 2022/23 the Idlib mujahideen are being courted by the U.S. war apparatus to make problems in Syria as a way to divert Russia.

lenkite4• 3 years ago

The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi.

Of-course they did! If you recall, there was even an offer made by Gadaffi and his sons for holding elections and a step-down if he lost. They even agreed to international observers for elections!

Every single concession was rejected by NATO as a "ploy". They wanted Gaddaffi dead.

Got the article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/6/16/gaddafi-son-offers-... but there were also several other concessions offered - all of which were singularly dismissed. The Libyan friends I used to know a decade ago weeped after Gadaffi died.

A nation state in the middle east that used to offer free education for both sexes and free medical care is now dust and ashes - all thanks to NATO.

csomar2• 3 years ago

It's not clear. His son seemed to be heading, at the time, for a middle-east style re-construction of the country. He essentially replaced his father but the revolution didn't let anything materialize as it happened shortly after that. He still has significant support: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/2/libya-court-reinsta...

what is happening in lybia now?

Nothing much. But a big problem of lack of governance is that critical infrastructure (like dams) gets neglected.

What’s the plan?

No plans.

Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?

Clearly doesn't work but no one wanted this situation except for some people located across the Atlantic.

weard_beard• 3 years ago

Why be cryptic? We all know it’s the French we’re talking about.

misja1114• 3 years ago

.. if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi

Gaddafi was assassinated by his own people. America and a few European countries gave military support to the rebels after Gaddafi had started trying to violently suppress the rebellion of his people, that is true. If they wouldn't have done that, he might have succeeded in murdering enough of his people to stay in power, who knows.

f6v4• 3 years ago

Rebellions aren’t good just because they’re rebellions.

polski-g• 3 years ago

Abraham Lincoln violently suppressed a rebellion of his people.

mschuster913• 3 years ago

When ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi.

Gaddafi would have died sooner or later anyway, and he was a kleptocrat like all other dictators were and are.

but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?

What would be needed is an intervention force that takes over the entire country and stabilizes it similar to the current setup in Bosnia and Kosovo - the warlords are in a stalemate. The problem is, NATO is too busy with Ukraine (and even that engagement is sadly controversial enough despite there being no troops involved), the US wants to focus on China, Europe can't be arsed to actually do anything (not that we could, we can't even supply Ukraine without seriously endangering the capabilities of our own armies), the French are even more reviled than Islamists are in Africa (see the recent putsches), the African Union is more of a paper tiger that's additionally focusing on the before-mentioned putsches, and China doesn't care as it's not part of their New Belt Road.

And even assuming that there would be someone interested in intervening in that shitshow, they won't get the UNSC mandate required for that, as either Russia or the US will veto such an operation.

The only way that any troops will deal with Libya is when Islamists make a resurgence because that is about the only threat that neither the US, Russia nor China really want to be able to rise.

Majromax2• 3 years ago

What would be needed is an intervention force that takes over the entire country and stabilizes it

An occupation force is not tenable in the modern era.

Per a Washington Post article from 2004[1], the post-WW2 occupation of Germany had an initial force ratio of one occupying soldier per 40 civilians. At that level, occupying forces could assume direct command of civil structures, without needing to sign deals with the least-bad bandits or warlords in waiting to act on our behalf.

Per Wikipedia, Libya's current population is a bit above 7 million. With a similar force ratio, that means an occupying force would require 175,000 soldiers. A Fermi estimate of cost is $100k/yr/soldier ($10k doesn't pay for salary, $1m is implausibly large), giving an occupation cost of $17.5bn/yr[2] before any special funding like (re)building major infrastructure projects.

This kind of cost is insupportable in a modern democracy, where voters will rightly ask why 'we' should bother. Libya was not and is not an existential threat like WW2-era Germany, and we're not in the imperial/colonial era where occupying forces could loot the country to pay for its own occupation.

[1] -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/05/09/a...

[2] -- This is also why meaningful intervention in Haiti will not happen, if you believe the calling-for-intervention reports that civil government has more or less collapsed in that nation.

mytailorisrich• 3 years ago

Gaddafi was bad but his regime did manage to make Libya one of the most developed countries of the region before Western sanctions eventually hit, and they did that without borrowing any money abroad thanks to their oil reserves.

the French are even more reviled than Islamists are in Africa

That is pure propaganda BS.

flohofwoe• 3 years ago

I don't remember the EU or America assassinating Gaddafi, only that he was killed by his own people Mussolini-style.

Ygg22• 3 years ago

Rocket that blew his convoy came from NATO bombers saying they weren't behind it is asinine.

postsantum• 3 years ago

I don't remember people being the cause of Gaddafi's assassination. There were bullets and knives actually

erfgh• 3 years ago

I envy you guys. It is so easy to live under the "America is to blame for everything, even floods" mentality. Everything is so easily and readily explained.

segmondy• 3 years ago

These dams haven't been maintained since 2002.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/13/why-did-dernas-dams...

r00fus• 3 years ago

If a working government existed (ie, before the US/EU destroyed a functioning one in the 2010s) then they might have been able to fix it in the past 10 years.

nonrandomstring• 3 years ago

Heartbreaking. The tone of all observers is that this is as much a failure of governance as an environmental catastrophe.

As everyone who was at Burning Man learned, plumbing and drainage is the basis of civilisation.

Letting it go to rack and ruin is storing up misery, so it worries me that in the UK we've had 20 years of government that has effectively "washed its hands" of water management.

AlecSchueler• 3 years ago

The situation in the UK is already becoming a concern if you look at the news about Lough Neagh.

pjc50• 3 years ago

It was remarkable how one of the first movements after withdrawing from the EU was to change the rules so water companies could dump sewage and render watercourses unsafe and polluted.

mymac3• 3 years ago

The price for that will be felt decades from now. It also tells you something about how the anti-EU lobby was financed.

IG_Semmelweiss2• 3 years ago

Sounds like regulatory capture was already deeply burrowed in the UK.

This doesn't sound remarkable in the sense that you could play industry roulette, and its just another industry could have bought what they wanted instead of the water lobby. The y seemed to bet on brexit and won big. There were likely EU lobby losers on the other side, likely buying influence for years for EU rules to favor them, and we don't know them because they did not happen overnight or they were bigger in scope.

So the questions are,

1) what are the flipsides ? Which EU regulatory captures became undone as a result of brexit , and are massively benefitting the brits ?

2) regulatory capture is not new. So what are the brits doing about it ?

hnbad3• 3 years ago

There's a dead comment here about how it was "actually a dam collapse, not a flood" and how no news source is reporting on that. From what I can gather, at a glance, at least the AP, The Guardian and Al Jazeera all state that the flood was the result of two dams collapsing and the cause of the collapse was the storm.

Even the article itself states that the two dams were poorly maintained and the collapse is the result of their state as much as the storm itself.

Given how many places have infrastructure rotting from either corruption or cost savings, I wonder how many more news stories we will see in the future that follow the pattern of "severe weather event results infrastructure failure killing thousands".

mymac3• 3 years ago

Root cause analysis is complex for a reason. Separating out contributing causes from root causes is difficult and sometimes even impossible.

Would this dam have failed eventually? Probably yes, on a long enough time-scale. Would it have failed now if not for that storm? Probably no.

Note that even in the developed West there are plenty of pieces of infrastructure at risk because of climate driven extremities.

badcppdev• 3 years ago

The dead comment was from a HN user who, from their comment history, has trouble fitting in with the norms of participation in this forum. They were unhappy with the use of the word flood even though the example sentence for the word flood in the Oxford dictionary is: "the dam burst, flooding a small town"

thedrbrian• 3 years ago

Letting it go to rack and ruin is storing up misery, so it worries me that in the UK we've had 20 years of government that has effectively "washed its hands" of water management.

interesting twitter thread here.

https://x.com/LoftusSteve/status/1659637753158545414?s=20

chrisandchris• 3 years ago

Twitter threads already were difficult to read. Now it seems I don't get to read anything without an account at all?

helpfulContrib• 3 years ago

The human loss is enormous. If only we applied our war resources to recovery instead, it would be extraordinary to see the people of the region granted access to the immense technological prowess of humanity, with intent to heal, not harm.

The poor of the region know little more than suffering, already. Worse than us all. If only we had the temerity to drop kettles, not bombs.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

Ugh, first I'm hearing of this. Some of that is my fault; I'm using Marl's* news aggregator which craps up the default feed with celebs and sportsball. I've had it set to National to avoid drowning in fluff-poo.

I need to invest in a better news supplier.

*ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507

Response to the disaster is slow, partially due to disaster response being sucked into the massive need of Morocco earthquake zone.

I wish the West was set up where we could volunteer family members to relief efforts (without loss of income > homelessness).

DiggyJohnson2• 3 years ago

I wish the West was set up where we could volunteer family members

This sounds insane so I surely must be misreading. Do you not mean "where we could volunteer [ourselves]"? I'm imagining a scene in the style of "The Death of Stalin" where I am woken up in the middle of the night and told "your brother has nominated you for relief efforts in Morocco, you have 10 minutes to gather your things."

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

Do you not mean "where we could volunteer [ourselves]"?

Sort of. I meant where we=family could volunteer members of the family.

Me and 5 adult sons live together. Everything is shared (resources, decisions) and 'we' winds up supplanting 'I' a lot.

To reduce confusion, I can be more mindful of pronoun use. At least until the new economy makes our arrangement widely familiar.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

In Crete currently, just across the sea some 300km away. We had a brush of storm Daniel, just a week of high wind and occasional rain. Nothing like what poured down there.

There are probably hundreds of bodies swimming in the sea right now just south from me. Sad, crazy, and probably a glimpse of new normal, as usually the poorest are most hit.

titzer• 3 years ago

The medicane strengthened as it crossed the unusually warm waters of the Mediterranean before dumping torrential rain on Libya on Sunday.
It brought more than 16 inches (414 mm) of rainfall in 24 hours to Al-Bayda, a city west of Derna, a new record.

This is the top end of the distribution shifting; a powerful storm powered by warm water that would have been nearly impossible without all the heat our extra CO2 has trapped and has been absorbed by the ocean. It's definitely a consequence of climate change, and it will get more frequent and worse.

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

Dams (and their collapses) are one of those risks which are latent and underappreciated but devastating force-multipliers of weather and climate-related events.

The Derna dam collapses, even with only partial death reports is already the second deadliest recorded dam failure, and is close on the lower-end range of death estimates for the worst, the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China, following another weather catastrophe, Typhoon Nina.

(If memory serves, Nina both stalled out over the Banqiao region and intersected with a more northerly cold front, creating a deluge effect similar to that of Superstorm Sandy over New York and New England, where warm tropical moisture was wrung from the atmosphere as it intersected colder air. In Nina's case, over a meter of rain fell within 24 hours.)

Dams are deceptively complex structures which appear simple, and can be built with relatively simple technology and persist for long periods of time with little ongoing maintenance and administration ... until they cannot. Most especially, dams are especially prone to governmental dysfunction in oversight, regulation, maintenance, and emergency planning. That last should include planning, risk assessment, risk mitigating, public education about risks and procedures, warning systems, crisis communications (between dam operators and government, and dam operators and downstream communities), disaster drills, and training in rescue, recovery, and relief operations.

Libya, a failing state divided by conflict, and for over forty years an autocratic dictatorship under a single ruler, lacks autonomous, independent, capable, and effective institutions for operating such infrastructure. It's all but certainly not the only such region.

Even what are considered to be rich and well-functioning democratic states see dam failures, or near failures. The near-failure of the Oroville Dam in California in 2017 followed mismanagement by the state water authority. The actual failures of the Edensville and Sanford Dams in Michigan in 2020 followed years of mismanagement by a private owner and ineffective regulation by the Michigan Deparment of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. In that case, property was damaged but no lives lost. Lake Dunlap in Texas suffered a spillway failure in 2019, again with ineffective management and regulation by this time by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, though again without loss of life.

One of the highest-risk dams in the United States is Isabella Dam, on the Kern River upstream of Bakersfield, CA. The topography somewhat resembles the images I've seen of Derna: a mountainous upstream terrain, narrow canyon, and a city lying directly in the floodplain of both the river and any potential dam collapse.

The problem presented by such dams with ongoing climate change is that all the factors involved compound:

- Climate change increases risks of extreme weather events, including Mediterranean-basin cyclonic storms as with Daniel.

- Climate-related stresses, including reduced crops and increased food prices, stress already-straining marginal states. The Arab Spring protests which ended up toppling Qaddafi's Libyan regime have been blamed in part on food stress from reduced harvests and increased food prices.

- Governmental corruption and ineffectiveness raise all potential disaster threats. What would be a modest property-related disaster with preparation, warning, evacuation, and response becomes a mass fatality event where one or more element is missing.

- Decreased liberal freedoms also tend to restrain technical concerns and criticisms. This was certainly the case at Banqiao, seems to be the case in Derna, and can be seen in other recent catastrophes such as the 2020 Beirut ammonium nitrate explosion (which also exhibited several other factors mentioned here).

A core problem with disaster and risk planning is that often contributing factors which are treated as independent turn out to be strongly correlated and interrelated. I believe we're seeing that again here.

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

Another Guardian story examines the contrast between Morocco's response to its earthquake disaster, and Libya to Storm Daniel and resulting dam collapses. It highlights some of the same points I've made above:

Peter Beaumont, a senior Guardian international reporter, has spent this week in the Atlas mountains and is a veteran of several reporting trips to Libya. He says: “Libya is a failed – or semi-failed – state that has been caught up in a protracted civil war since 2011, which has obviously had a massive impact on the country’s infrastructure and social cohesion.

“Morocco, on the other hand, is a functioning modern state. The place works – Marrakech, Tangier, Rabat are all modern cities. Ordinary people have been mobilised on a mass scale, and there is a very strong sense of nationhood.”

<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/15/libya-and-moro...>

dredmorbius3• 3 years ago

There's a good in-depth look at this situation by the NY Times which supports much of what I'd written above, and dives into more specific details and history. HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37534800>

Concerns with these dams dates to 1986, 37 years ago, with engineering studies put off another 12 years, and an attempt at remediation finally committed to only four months before Libya fell into civil war in 2011. And yes, there are broader geopoliticial strategies playing out with multiple parties involved.

alecfreudenberg• 3 years ago

Unfortunately this is what happens when your infrastructure is nearly indistinguishable from a sandcastle

vwcx• 3 years ago

If you're looking to read more into the basics of this disaster, I was impressed by the clarity of these Washington Post graphics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/12/deadly-libya...

‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k

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