More than 10,000 people are missing and 3,000 confirmed dead after catastrophic flooding in the Libyan city of Derna where heavy rains caused two dams to fail last weekend, the Guardian reports.
“Bodies are lying everywhere – in the sea, in the valleys, under the buildings,” Civil Aviation Minister Hichem Chkiouat said after surveying the devastation from above. “I am not exaggerating when I say that 25% of the city has disappeared. Many, many buildings have collapsed.” A local man said the dams bursted with incredible force owing to the massive volume of water collected. “The depths of some of the valleys in which water collects reach about 400 metres. Therefore, when the dam collapsed, the water was released like an atomic bomb, and eight bridges and residential buildings collapsed completely,” Hudhayfah al-Hasadi told US government-owned Arabic TV station Al-Hurra.
The Guardian’s report makes mention of the weather system “Storm Daniel,” which we guess is some meteorological service or media outlet’s moniker, kind of like how the Weather Channel unilaterally tags snowstorms with stupid names like “Winter Storm Izzy” and “Orlena” in a bullshit way to make them “feel” more like hurricanes. Which would mean we’d be total assholes for making that very obvious joke about “Storm Daniel” amid such widespread suffering for regular folks.