Central Street, once a focus of economic activity in Derna lined with shops, was largely deserted, the silence broken only by the sound of the wind whistling past mangled buildings as a few people sat disconsolate in the road, sipping coffee and surveying the damage.

“The first thing I’m afraid of is that this will take a long time,” said 44-year-old teacher Tarek Faheem al-Hasadi, whose wife and five young grandchildren were killed in the flood. He and his son survived by climbing onto the roof.

“This needs persistence and I’m afraid that the support that is coming is temporary,” he said between tears, standing guard in front his ruined home, but adding that he was determined not to leave the area.

A three-storey building standing opposite had been swept 60 metres (200 feet) down the road by the floodwaters, Hasadi said.

At Derna’s seafront, where a wrecked car could be seen perched on top of concrete storm breakers and driftwood was strewn across muddy pools, diggers worked to clear the path for rescue teams and a helicopter scanned the sea for bodies.

Entire districts of Derna, with an estimated population of at least 120,000, were swept away or buried in brown mud after two dams south of the city broke on Sunday night unleashing torrents of floodwater down a usually dry riverbed.

The International Organization for Migration mission in Libya has said that more than 5,000 people were presumed dead, with 3,922 deaths registered in hospitals. About 38,640 were displaced in the flood-stricken region.

The true death toll could be far higher, officials say.

“The situation is very, very tragic,” said Qais, a rescue worker from Tunisia at the seafront who only gave his first name. “We have never seen such damage caused by water.”

More than 450 bodies had been recovered in the past three days from the seashore, including 10 from under the rubble, said Kamal Al-Siwi, the official in charge of missing people.

“The work is ongoing and is very, very, very complicated,” he told Reuters. “This operation in my opinion, needs months and years.”

Mass Graves

The World Health Organization said on Saturday it had flown in enough emergency aid to reach nearly 250,000 people affected by Storm Daniel across eastern Libya, including essential medicines, surgery supplies and body bags for the deceased.

Saudi Arabia announced the departure of its first aid flight to Libya and Russia said the third of its aid flights had arrived carrying a mobile hospital.

An Italian naval ship docked in Derna with supplies including tents, blankets, water pumps and tractors, Italy’s Embassy in Libya said, posting photos of smaller vessels bringing equipment ashore.

More than 1,000 people have been buried in mass graves, according to the United Nations, drawing warnings from aid groups about the risk of contaminating water or causing mental distress to families of the deceased.

The head of Libya’s National Centre for Disease Control, Hayder Al-Sayah, said there was little risk from corpses unless they were carrying diseases, but that recorded cases of diarrhoea had risen to 150 from 55 on Friday due to people drinking polluted water.

Derna has been hit hard by the turmoil and conflict in Libya since the NATO-backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi during a popular uprising in 2011.

It was controlled for several years by jihadist militants before forces loyal to eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) besieged and took control of the city in 2019.

Infrastructure across Libya has been degraded amid the political paralysis of the past decade, and experts had warned that Derna faced potential disaster if maintenance work was not carried out on the dams outside the city.

Libya’s continuing political divisions, with rival administrations and parliaments in the east and west, could hamper the aid effort.

Syrians from all walks of life had left their war-torn country for the Libyan city of Derna over the past years, looking for work and better opportunities.

Now, dozens of them are missing and feared dead after Mediterranean storm Daniel unleashed catastrophic flooding that tore through the coastal city on Sunday night, wreaking destruction and washing entire neighborhoods out to sea.

The death toll has eclipsed 11,000 and more than 10,000 are missing. Five days on, searchers are still digging through mud and hollowed-out buildings in Derna, looking for bodies.

According to a war monitoring group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 42 Syrians have been confirmed dead in Libya while the real number could be as high as 150.

The victims include both Syrians who were living and working in Libya long term, and Syrian migrants who were using Libya as a transit point in efforts to reach Europe, most often by way of perilous voyages across the Mediterranean Sea, in unsafe boats organized by smugglers.

Two years ago, Nisma Jbawi’s 19-year-old son Ammar Kanaan left their home in Syria’s southern province of Daraa — one of the epicenters of the 2011 uprising against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

He headed to Libya, where he planned to work and save money to pay Syrian authorities a fee of about $8,000 that would spare him from compulsory military service.

Jbawi said her son last spoke with her on Sunday afternoon. He told her he would close the sweet shop where he worked and go home because a strong storm was expected. She tried repeatedly to call him on Monday, without success. His WhatsApp account shows his phone was last online at around 1:30 a.m. Monday.

“We still have hope,” she said, tears choking her up.

As the storm pounded Derna late Sunday, residents said they heard loud explosions when the dams outside the city collapsed. Floodwaters washed down Wadi Derna, a river running from the mountains through the city and into the sea.

On Tuesday, Kanaan’s uncle drove to Derna from the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi where he works — only to find that the building where his nephew lived had been washed out to sea.

“All who were inside are presumed dead,” Jbawi said.

Rami Abdurrahman, who runs the Observatory, said he has not been able to confirm a single survivor out of the 150 Syrians missing in Derna since Sunday night. But definite numbers are hard to come by in the chaotic aftermath of the destruction.

Like Syria, where the civil war has killed half a million people and forced more than 5 million to become refugees around the world, Libya as been through its own years of conflict.

The oil-rich North African country has been split between rival governments in the east and west since 2014, backed by with various militia forces and international patrons. Derna is governed by Libya’s eastern administration, where military commander Khalifa Hiftar wields significant power.

Still, for some Syrians, Libya offered prospects of a better life. Syrians can easily get into Libya on a tourist visa and find work — wages are higher than what many earn at home.

Zeid Marabeh, 19, came to Libya two years ago from the central city of Homs and worked as a carpenter.

He recounted to The Associated Press over the phone from Derna how he watched water surging toward his building on Sunday night.

“Then I heard a loud boom,” Marabeh said. It was the moment the dams collapsed.

When water levels started rising in his neighborhood, he frantically ran toward higher ground — the nearby Eastern Shiha hill. From there, he saw the water destroy almost everything in its path.

He went back on Monday morning, after the waters subsided, to check on his uncle and relatives. The building where they lived had disappeared. His uncle, Abdul-Ilah Marabeh, his aunt Zeinab and their 1-year-old daughter Shahd were gone, he said.

Marabeh said he looked through the rows of bodies laid out on their street but could not find his uncle’s family.

In the Syrian capital of Damascus on Thursday, members of the Qalaaji family were receiving condolences for their eight family members killed in Derna.

Firas Qalaji, his wife Rana Khateeb and their six children were to be buried in Libya, the family said in a statement.

Ghina al-Qassim said her nephew, Hani Turkomani, was a dentist who arrived in Derna some nine months ago “to improve his life.” His cousins, already there, had found him a job.

After the floodwaters subsided, the cousins, who survived the tragedy, went looking for him. They said his apartment was full of water and mud but a large hole in the wall raised their hopes that he might have escaped from the building or been pulled out by rescue workers, al-Qassim said.

“God willing,” she added.