The first sign that something was wrong was the sound of the dogs barking.
It was 2.30am and dark outside. When Husam Abdelgawi, a 31-year-old accountant in the Libyan city of Derna, got up and went sleepily downstairs to check on them, he felt water under his feet.
Husam opened the front door of the house he shared with his younger brother, Ibrahim. More water flooded in, pulling the door off of its hinges.
The brothers ran to the back door, where they were met by a “ghastly, unimaginable scene, worse than death itself to witness”, Husam said, in a phone interview from the city of Al-Qubbah.
“The bodies of women and children were floating past us. Cars and entire houses were caught up in the current. Some of the bodies were swept by the water into our house.”
The water swept Husam and Ibrahim up too, carrying them farther and faster than they imagined possible. Within seconds, they were 150m apart.
Ibrahim, 28, managed to grab on to floating power cables still tethered to their poles and grapple himself back towards where Husam was stuck. The brothers used the cables like ropes to pull themselves towards a nearby building and through a third-floor window, and from there they made it to a fifth-floor rooftop where they could wait out the flood.
“The area where we were was a higher part of the city,” Husam said. “In the lower parts, I don’t think anyone on the fifth or sixth floors has survived. I think they are all dead. May God have mercy on their souls.”
People look missing notices in the aftermath of the floods in Derna.Image source, Reuters
Image caption,
People look at missing notices in the aftermath of the floods in Derna
According to the Red Crescent, about 11,000 people are now known to have died in the catastrophic flooding that has hit Libya following Storm Daniel. Derna’s mayor has warned that 20,000 people may have lost their lives.
Source: bbc.com
