From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Dire Warnings About Libya Dams Went Unheeded   
   By Aaron Boxerman and James Glanz, Sept. 16, 2023, NY Times   
   It had been clear for years that the dams protecting Derna, on Libya’s   
   Mediterranean coast, were in danger of giving way.   
      
   Torrential rains were not new. Decade after decade, they had pounded the area,   
   washing away the soil that helped soak up water as it ran down from the dry   
   hills above town.   
      
   Then, there were the decades of neglect by officials — who knew the dams   
   needed repairs — in a country so torn by years of civil war that it still   
   has two opposing governments: one in the west and another in the east, where   
   Derna lies.   
      
   Academics had warned that it would not require a storm of biblical proportions   
   to overwhelm the dams.   
      
   The residents of Derna are “extremely vulnerable to flood risk,” wrote   
   Abdelwanees Ashoor, a hydraulic engineer at Omar Al-Mukhtar University in   
   Libya, in a paper he published in 2022.   
      
   The kind of storms that had hit the area in recent decades — he cited a   
   damaging flood in 1959 — could bring down the dams and inundate Derna, he   
   warned, calling the situation “dangerous.”   
      
   This past week, those predictions grimly proved to be true, when enormous   
   flooding from a powerful storm broke through both dams and swept parts of the   
   city into the sea. Thousands are dead and many more missing, according to the   
   authorities. According    
   to the International Organization for Migration, over 34,000 people were   
   displaced by the catastrophe.   
      
   Reached by phone, Dr. Ashoor said he had lost several members of his extended   
   family to the flooding this past week, adding that the government had ignored   
   years of warnings — including his own paper.   
      
   “We’re living in shock. We can’t absorb what’s happening to us,” Dr.   
   Ashoor said. “The state wasn’t interested in this. Instead, they guzzled   
   money, practiced corruption and fought political squabbles.”   
      
   https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/16/world/middleeast/libya-dams-warnings.html   
      
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