Libya Arrests Derna Mayor and Other Officials for Negligence After Killer Flood

“Aguila, we don’t want you! All Libyans are brothers!” the demonstrators chanted, a sign that Derna lost whatever faith it had in the Tobruk government. Some outside observers speculated the protests were coordinated, especially since the mosque has been off-limits to the public since the floods but was suddenly swarming with people on Monday.

If the protests are indeed coordinated, the goal is presumably to get Derna to break away from the eastern government. A minister in Tobruk on Tuesday asked all journalists to leave Derna, prompting accusations that the eastern parliament wants to punish the city for embarrassing it.

ABC News noted that decades of warnings about the flagging condition of the dams were ignored, including some issued before the 2011 invasion by former United States President Barack Obama that wiped out Libya’s central government and plunged the country into chaos:

The dams were built by a Yugoslav construction company in the 1970s above Wadi Derna, a river valley which divides the city. They were meant to protect the city from flash floods, which are not uncommon in the area. The dams were not maintained for decades, despite warnings by scientists that they may burst.

A report by a state-run audit agency in 2021 said the two dams hadn’t been maintained despite the allocation of more than $2 million for that purpose in 2012 and 2013.

A Turkish firm was contracted in 2007 to carry out maintenance on the two dams and to build a third one in between them. The firm, Arsel Construction Company Ltd., said on its website that it completed its work in November 2012. It didn’t respond to an email seeking further comment.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on Monday traced a “long trail of conflict and corruption” behind the Derna dam collapse, beginning during the regime of ousted dictator Moammar Qaddafi and running through the years when Islamic State extremists controlled the city before they were ejected by the military commander of the eastern government, Khalifa Haftar.

According to the WSJ’s history, the Derna dams were conceived in 1978 as “part of Qaddafi’s plans to scale up Libya’s economy after he came to power a little under a decade earlier.”

People who lost their lives in floods are buried in mass graves as the search and rescue operations continue in Derna, Libya on September 16, 2023. (Hamza Al Ahmar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The international isolation that came after the Lockerbie bombings threw the dam projects into chaos, resulting in subpar construction that alarmed foreign engineers who were brought in after U.N. sanctions were lifted in 2003. Some of those engineers were caught up in the turbulence of Qaddafi’s mercurial rule, nervously pulling out of the country as their recommendations on Derna were ignored or underfunded due to power struggles within the Qaddafi regime.

After Qaddafi fell, officials across Libya found themselves with about $10 billion in debt and very little to show for it, the funds allocated for infrastructure having been squandered by Qaddafi, his sons, and a legion of squabbling regime officials. 

The ensuing years of strife and civil war all but guaranteed nothing would be done about improving the dams. Derna’s Islamic State conquerors were not much interested in civil engineering, and neither was Haftar. At one point, the water minister of Derna was locked out of his office by militia fighters loyal to his cranky deputy. The minister froze all funding for water projects, the government allocated no further funds for improvement, and then Mediterranean Storm Daniel arrived to extract a terrible price for those decades of neglect.