DERNA: Telephone and internet communications were severed Tuesday to Libya’s flood-affected city of Derna, a day after hundreds protested against local authorities they blamed for the thousands of deaths.
A tsunami-sized flash flood broke through two ageing river dams upstream from Derna on the night of 10 September and razed whole neighbourhoods, sweeping untold thousands into the Mediterranean Sea.
Protesters massed on Monday at the city’s grand mosque, expressing their anger at local and regional officials they blamed for failing to maintain the dams or to provide early warning of the calamity, AFP reported.
Protestors shouted slogans such as “traitors and thieves must hang”, before some of them torched the house of the unpopular mayor of the town.
Flood Destruction in Libya
On Tuesday, phone and online links to Derna were cut off, an outage the national telecom company LPTIC blamed on “a rupture in the optical fibre” link to the city, in a statement on its Facebook page.
The telecom company said the outage, which also affected other regions in eastern Libya, could be the result of a deliberate act of sabotage and vowed that its teams are working to repair it as quickly as possible.
Rescue workers are still digging for bodies, with the official death toll at least 11,300 but many thousands more missing since the flood sparked by torrential rains from Mediterranean Storm Daniel.
The huge wall of water that smashed into the city completely swept away 891 buildings and damaged more than 600 more, according to a Libyan government report based on satellite images.
Oil-rich Libya was affected by more than a decade of war and chaos after a 2011 NATO-backed uprising resulted in the ouster and killing of Muammar Gaddafi.
