By Ahmed Elumami, Ayman al-Warfali and Essam Alfetori
DERNA, Libya (Reuters) - Survivors of a flood that devastated the center of a Libyan city scoured the ruins on Thursday searching for their loved ones among thousands of dead and missing, as authorities feared an outbreak of disease from bodies. decomposing.
A torrent unleashed by a powerful storm burst dams Sunday night and rushed down the bed of a seasonal river that bisects the city, sweeping multi-story buildings into the sea with families sleeping inside. Thousands of people have been confirmed dead and thousands more missing, and the mayor says the number of victims could reach 20,000.
Usama Al Husadi, a 52-year-old driver, had been searching for his wife and five children since the disaster.
"I went on foot looking for them... I went to all the hospitals and schools, but I had no luck," he told Reuters, crying with his head in his hands.
Husadi, who had been working the night of the storm, redialed his wife's phone number. He was off.
"We lost at least 50 members of my father's family, missing and dead," he said.
Brick factory worker Wali Eddin Mohamed Adam, 24, who lives on the outskirts, woke up to the sound of water on the night of the storm and ran to the city center to discover it was gone. He had lost about 15 family members and nine friends.
"They were all swept down the valley towards the sea," he said. โMay God have mercy on them and grant them heaven.โ
The confirmed death tolls given by officials so far have varied, but they are all in the thousands, and there are thousands more on lists of the missing. Derna Mayor Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi told Saudi Al Arabiya television that the death toll in the city could reach between 18,000 and 20,000, depending on the extent of the damage.
"We actually need teams specialized in recovering bodies," he told Reuters in Derna. โI fear that the city will be infected with an epidemic due to the large number of corpses under the rubble and in the water.โ
RESCUE TEAMS
Rescue teams have arrived from Egypt, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Qatar, al-Ghaithi said. Tรผrkiye will send a ship with equipment to set up two field hospitals.
The beach was full of clothes, toys, furniture, shoes and other belongings carried by the torrent from the houses.
The streets were covered in deep mud and littered with uprooted trees and hundreds of smashed cars, many of them flipped on their sides or roofs. A car was trapped on the second floor balcony of a destroyed building.
"I survived with my wife but I lost my sister," said Mohamed Mohsen Bujmila, a 41-year-old engineer. โMy sister lives downtown where most of the destruction occurred. โWe found the bodies of her husband and her son and buried them.โ
He also found the bodies of two unknown men in his apartment.
As he spoke, a nearby Egyptian search and rescue team recovered his neighbor's body.
โThis is Aunt Khadija, may God grant her heaven,โ Bujmila said.
The devastation is clear from the high points above Derna, where the center of the densely populated city was now a wide, flat crescent of land with expanses of muddy water glistening in the sun.
Rescue operations are complicated by political fractures in the country of 7 million people that has been at war on and off without a strong central government since a NATO-backed uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
An internationally recognized Government of National Unity (GNU) is based in Tripoli in the west, while a parallel administration operates in the east, including Derna.
(Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
