Mustafa al-Trabelsi attended a meeting about state of the dams days before Storm Daniel hit city
In Derna, and indeed across Libya, everyone is sharing a poem called The Rain, written by a poet from the city, Mustafa al-Trabelsi, who died in the floods. On 6 September, days before writing the poem, he had attended a meeting at the Derna house of culture to discuss the risk of a flood in the city and the state of the dams.
The poem is short but pertinent. It reads:
It was an alarm bell that the appointed officials of Derna chose not to hear. So now, residents say, the city resounds to a different sound – one of anguish as mothers talk about the loss of their children.
In the streets there are shouts of excitement when signs of life are discovered, but more often the painful search through the ruins ends only with discovery of corpses in the mud, or nothing, and silence.
By the sea, where many victims were dispatched by the raging river, Turkish rescue workers wearing scuba suits pick through the floating detritus of a destroyed town in search of bodies.
Officials said 300 survivors, including 13 children, had been rescued. The news brought some joy, but a doctor broke down in tears as he was pressed by a TV crew to say whether more than 10,000 were dead – a question to which he could not know the answer.
In an attempt to give a sense that the response was being well managed, it was briefed that Brig Gen Saddam Haftar, head of the Libyan National Army operations room and son of the ageing Gen Khalifa Hafter, was overseeing rescue and recovery efforts.
