Sabreen Blil was kneeling in the rubble of her brother's house, the wind whipping at her black robes as she clawed with her bare hands at the flattened masonry in hopes of somehow digging down to the family buried beneath.
She recited their names while crying.
"Taym, Yazan, Luqman, Salmah, Tumador, Hakim and his wife. My God. My family, where are you?" she moaned. "Oh God. Even just one, my God, let me find even one body."
A week after the flood that swept away the center of the Libyan city of Derna, families continue to deal with the unbearable losses of their dead and are tormented by the unknown fate of the missing.
The center of Derna is a wasteland, with stray dogs standing nonchalantly on mounds of mud where buildings once stood. Other buildings still stand precariously above the lower floors that were mostly razed. The legs of a shop mannequin wearing dusty pants stick out of the rubble in a ruined store.
Dams above the city burst in a storm a week ago that sent a massive torrent down the bed of a seasonal river that runs through the center of the Mediterranean city of 120,000.
There are thousands dead and thousands more missing. Officials using different methodologies have provided very different toll figures so far; The mayor estimates that more than 20,000 people were lost. The World Health Organization has confirmed 3,922 deaths.
Faded hopes
But Blil and other residents are mourning the countless thousands who are not on any confirmed list. He conjures up a photo of his young nephew on his cell phone, holding a kitten above his head with one outstretched hand.
"They played here. They were sitting here. They came out to visit me and I visited them. There's nothing left. The floods took everything away," Blil said. "His toys, his books, his father, his mother."
Authorities have not yet given up on the possibility of finding people alive, Othman Abduljaleel, health minister in the administration that controls eastern Libya, told Reuters.
"Hopes of finding survivors are fading, but we will continue efforts to search for any possible survivors," he said by phone.
"Now efforts are focused on rescuing anyone and recovering bodies from under the rubble, especially at sea, with the participation of many divers and specialized rescue teams from the countries."
For Ahmed Ashour, 62, the dwindling hope of finding survivors has meant accepting that he will have to raise his three-month-old orphaned granddaughter. His daughter is gone. His wife still hasn't accepted it.
"Her mother is convinced she is still alive. I am convinced she is dead," he said.
Ahmed Kassar, 69, sat in front of his ruined house with a cigarette burned almost up to his fingers, crying silently for four of his children - two daughters and two sons - who drowned inside their flooded house, powerless. escape before the waters rose to their roof.
"Catastrophe. I'm all alone now," Kassar muttered over and over again. He escaped death only because he had left for neighboring Egypt for medical treatment just before the storm hit Derna.
"I am not only saddened by their death, I am saddened by having left and not having been able to fulfill my role as a father for them, to guarantee the future of my children," he said.
Failed state
The roads to Derna were jammed Monday with ambulances and trucks carrying food, water, diapers, mattresses and other supplies.
Men dressed in white hazmat suits sprayed disinfectant fog with pumps mounted on the back of a pickup truck and with hoses in backpacks, as authorities hoped to stem the spread of disease.
"We are disinfecting the streets, the mosques, the shelters where the displaced are staying, the mortuary refrigerators, the ruined streets and the corpses," said Akbar al-Qatani, head of the environment directorate based in Benghazi, the capital of facto of eastern Libya.
The International Rescue Committee charity said the floods had left thousands of people without access to clean water, increasing the risk of waterborne diseases.
Western countries and regional states have sent teams of rescuers and mobile hospitals. Five Greek rescuers, including three members of the armed forces, died in a car accident on Sunday.
The recovery effort has been hampered by chaos in a nation that has been a failed state since a NATO-backed uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Derna is in the east, beyond the control of an internationally recognized government in the west, and until 2019 was held by a succession of Islamist militant groups, including branches of Al Qaeda and Islamic State.
Residents say the threat to the city posed by the collapsing dams above it was widely known, and projects to repair the dams had been stalled for more than a decade. They also blame authorities for not evacuating residents in time.
