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‘Sea is constantly dumping bodies’: fears Libya flood death toll may hit 20k
- totetsu 3y agoWhen ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi. I know that’s kind of a knee jerk reaction, but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?
- _ph_ 3y agoMy impression is, that Libya is at least split into two major factions and as they are bound in their internal conflict there is no international politic any more. Which conveniently allowed the west to mostly forget about Libya. I saw a heartbreaking report about the disaster region yesterday. One interesting aspect were hints that this disaster might have stimulated more cooperation inside Libya. May be this is a starting point for sorting out their internal political problems. I would really wish it to the people of Libya.
- sokoloff 3y agoThe US experienced a significant unifying force 22 years and 4 days ago. The effect was very clearly only temporary.
- the-dude 3y agoIt was still far too long.
- csomar 3y agoLast time I visited the US, the TSA still exists. Pretty sure the effects have remained. Not sure about the "unifying force" fantasy though.
- mrguyorama 3y ago9/11 didn't unify the USA, it was used as a cudgel to beat any defectors into submission.
- sokoloff 3y agoI was in the US on Thursday September 6th and Thursday September 13th. From everything I observed in the days and weeks following, there was a massive increase in feelings and expressions of unity. (These were also temporary.)
- jiofj 3y agoWhy is it a knee-jerk reaction to think that the NATO shouldn't meddle with the politics of other countries?
- totetsu 3y agoI mean that I haven’t kept up to date with the situation there, and I don’t know if in the past this region and this dam were administered any better or not. I’m just assuming that the NATO intervention and the fracturing of the country into civil wars is to blame here.
- marsa 3y agoaccording to Derna's deputy mayor quoted in [1] "the dams have not been maintained since 2002", so it seems unlikely that NATO intervention is to blame (though that was my kneejerk assumption too). the situation in Libya post NATO intervention certainly contributed to the negligence, but it has been going on for years at that point. [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/12/infrastructure-in-libyas-derna-not-built-to-withstand-storm-deputy-mayor https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/12/infrastructure-in-l...
- PedroBatista 3y agoThe "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi. If the "alternate reality" didn't already erased it, you may recall something called "Arab Spring". It's not like Gaddafi was in a stable position at the time, and even less likely he would skate the whole situation until today. Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the rebellion in Benghazi and enforced a no-fly zone otherwise Gaddafi's planes would obliterate the rebel forces and the civilians living in those cities ( which started to happen, before the EU and US moved their asses ). Speaking of "assassinations", I don't think Gaddafi's forces would punish the offenders with only a slap on the wrist. Do I need to mention the shipping containers with bullet holes in the Sun at the desert full of prisoners? Everyone's "performance" has been bad, but why don't we talk about Syria/Russia dealings in Libya in the last ~5 years? which coincidentally have been the worse and more unstable years since the 2011 war? ( Not to mention the usual bottom feeders of doom that appear in these situations, ie. the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and every other "entrepreneur" group funded by the bored Sheiks in the Arabian Peninsula?
- mcv 3y agoExactly. If the EU and US hadn't stopped Gaddafi from killing his own people, the tragedy would also have been terrible. Worse than now? Better than now? Should they have known? It's impossible to say.
- penneallagricia 3y agoIf its impossible to say, then why intervene? If you can't prove that bombing will have net positive effects then why do it?
- _Algernon_ 3y agoIs omniscience a prerequisite to reacting? Nothing would ever get done then.
- penneallagricia 3y ago
- csomar 3y agoIt's not clear. His son seemed to be heading, at the time, for a middle-east style re-construction of the country. He essentially replaced his father but the revolution didn't let anything materialize as it happened shortly after that. He still has significant support: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/2/libya-court-reinstates-gaddafis-son-as-presidential-candidate https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/2/libya-court-reinsta... > what is happening in lybia now? Nothing much. But a big problem of lack of governance is that critical infrastructure (like dams) gets neglected. > What’s the plan? No plans. > Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore? Clearly doesn't work but no one wanted this situation except for some people located across the Atlantic.
- weard_beard 3y agoWhy be cryptic? We all know it’s the French we’re talking about.
- mhalberstram 3y agoSomething that might be relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_French_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_Libyan_financing_in_th...
- mschuster91 3y ago> When ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi. Gaddafi would have died sooner or later anyway, and he was a kleptocrat like all other dictators were and are. > but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore? What would be needed is an intervention force that takes over the entire country and stabilizes it similar to the current setup in Bosnia and Kosovo - the warlords are in a stalemate. The problem is, NATO is too busy with Ukraine (and even that engagement is sadly controversial enough despite there being no troops involved), the US wants to focus on China, Europe can't be arsed to actually do anything (not that we could, we can't even supply Ukraine without seriously endangering the capabilities of our own armies), the French are even more reviled than Islamists are in Africa (see the recent putsches), the African Union is more of a paper tiger that's additionally focusing on the before-mentioned putsches, and China doesn't care as it's not part of their New Belt Road. And even assuming that there would be someone interested in intervening in that shitshow, they won't get the UNSC mandate required for that, as either Russia or the US will veto such an operation. The only way that any troops will deal with Libya is when Islamists make a resurgence because that is about the only threat that neither the US, Russia nor China really want to be able to rise.
- Majromax 3y ago> What would be needed is an intervention force that takes over the entire country and stabilizes it An occupation force is not tenable in the modern era. Per a Washington Post article from 2004[1], the post-WW2 occupation of Germany had an initial force ratio of one occupying soldier per 40 civilians. At that level, occupying forces could assume direct command of civil structures, without needing to sign deals with the least-bad bandits or warlords in waiting to act on our behalf. Per Wikipedia, Libya's current population is a bit above 7 million. With a similar force ratio, that means an occupying force would require 175,000 soldiers. A Fermi estimate of cost is $100k/yr/soldier ($10k doesn't pay for salary, $1m is implausibly large), giving an occupation cost of $17.5bn/yr[2] before any special funding like (re)building major infrastructure projects. This kind of cost is insupportable in a modern democracy, where voters will rightly ask why 'we' should bother. Libya was not and is not an existential threat like WW2-era Germany, and we're not in the imperial/colonial era where occupying forces could loot the country to pay for its own occupation. [1] -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/05/09/a-proven-formula-for-how-many-troops-we-need/5c6dbfc9-33f8-4648-bd07-40d244a1daa4/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/05/09/a... [2] -- This is also why meaningful intervention in Haiti will not happen, if you believe the calling-for-intervention reports that civil government has more or less collapsed in that nation.
- misja111 3y ago> .. if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi Gaddafi was assassinated by his own people. America and a few European countries gave military support to the rebels after Gaddafi had started trying to violently suppress the rebellion of his people, that is true. If they wouldn't have done that, he might have succeeded in murdering enough of his people to stay in power, who knows.
- flohofwoe 3y agoI don't remember the EU or America assassinating Gaddafi, only that he was killed by his own people Mussolini-style.
- Ygg2 3y agoRocket that blew his convoy came from NATO bombers saying they weren't behind it is asinine.
- edgyquant 3y agoHe wasn’t killed by rockets
- postsantum 3y agoI don't remember people being the cause of Gaddafi's assassination. There were bullets and knives actually
- erfgh 3y agoI envy you guys. It is so easy to live under the "America is to blame for everything, even floods" mentality. Everything is so easily and readily explained.
- tokai 3y ago[flagged]
- segmondy 3y agoThese dams haven't been maintained since 2002. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/13/why-did-dernas-dams-break-when-storm-daniel-hit-libya https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/13/why-did-dernas-dams...
- r00fus 3y agoIf a working government existed (ie, before the US/EU destroyed a functioning one in the 2010s) then they might have been able to fix it in the past 10 years.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoHeartbreaking. The tone of all observers is that this is as much a failure of governance as an environmental catastrophe. As everyone who was at Burning Man learned, plumbing and drainage is the basis of civilisation. Letting it go to rack and ruin is storing up misery, so it worries me that in the UK we've had 20 years of government that has effectively "washed its hands" of water management.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoThe situation in the UK is already becoming a concern if you look at the news about Lough Neagh.
- pjc50 3y agoIt was remarkable how one of the first movements after withdrawing from the EU was to change the rules so water companies could dump sewage and render watercourses unsafe and polluted.
- mymac 3y agoThe price for that will be felt decades from now. It also tells you something about how the anti-EU lobby was financed.
- theshrike79 3y agoBut the people who supported Brexit will be dead or close to it when that price will be paid, so they don't care.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoSounds like regulatory capture was already deeply burrowed in the UK. This doesn't sound remarkable in the sense that you could play industry roulette, and its just another industry could have bought what they wanted instead of the water lobby. The y seemed to bet on brexit and won big. There were likely EU lobby losers on the other side, likely buying influence for years for EU rules to favor them, and we don't know them because they did not happen overnight or they were bigger in scope. So the questions are, 1) what are the flipsides ? Which EU regulatory captures became undone as a result of brexit , and are massively benefitting the brits ? 2) regulatory capture is not new. So what are the brits doing about it ?
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- elzbardico 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoUgh, first I'm hearing of this. Some of that is my fault; I'm using Marl's* news aggregator which craps up the default feed with celebs and sportsball. I've had it set to National to avoid drowning in fluff-poo. I need to invest in a better news supplier. *ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507 Response to the disaster is slow, partially due to disaster response being sucked into the massive need of Morocco earthquake zone. I wish the West was set up where we could volunteer family members to relief efforts (without loss of income > homelessness).
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago> I wish the West was set up where we could volunteer family members This sounds insane so I surely must be misreading. Do you not mean "where we could volunteer [ourselves]"? I'm imagining a scene in the style of "The Death of Stalin" where I am woken up in the middle of the night and told "your brother has nominated you for relief efforts in Morocco, you have 10 minutes to gather your things."
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> Do you not mean "where we could volunteer [ourselves]"? Sort of. I meant where we=family could volunteer members of the family. Me and 5 adult sons live together. Everything is shared (resources, decisions) and 'we' winds up supplanting 'I' a lot. To reduce confusion, I can be more mindful of pronoun use. At least until the new economy makes our arrangement widely familiar.
- DiggyJohnson 3y agoAll good, appreciate the explanation. I was goofing around imagining an intersection of the Baker Act and Red Cross volunteering, but on rereading my language was too strong. I don't ever want to come across like the language police, please don't change your verbiage on my account. Best of luck to you and your family.
- saiya-jin 3y agoIn Crete currently, just across the sea some 300km away. We had a brush of storm Daniel, just a week of high wind and occasional rain. Nothing like what poured down there. There are probably hundreds of bodies swimming in the sea right now just south from me. Sad, crazy, and probably a glimpse of new normal, as usually the poorest are most hit.
- titzer 3y ago> The medicane strengthened as it crossed the unusually warm waters of the Mediterranean before dumping torrential rain on Libya on Sunday. > It brought more than 16 inches (414 mm) of rainfall in 24 hours to Al-Bayda, a city west of Derna, a new record. This is the top end of the distribution shifting; a powerful storm powered by warm water that would have been nearly impossible without all the heat our extra CO2 has trapped and has been absorbed by the ocean. It's definitely a consequence of climate change, and it will get more frequent and worse.
- hellothere1337 3y ago[flagged]
- dredmorbius 3y agoEschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>
- hellothere1337 3y agoWhere did I insinuate about astroturfing mate?
- dredmorbius 3y agoIn your now-deleted comment, which had already been flagged when I wrote the above.
- hellothere1337 3y ago[flagged]
- juanani 3y ago[dead]
- dredmorbius 3y agoDams (and their collapses) are one of those risks which are latent and underappreciated but devastating force-multipliers of weather and climate-related events. The Derna dam collapses, even with only partial death reports is already the second deadliest recorded dam failure, and is close on the lower-end range of death estimates for the worst, the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China, following another weather catastrophe, Typhoon Nina. (If memory serves, Nina both stalled out over the Banqiao region and intersected with a more northerly cold front, creating a deluge effect similar to that of Superstorm Sandy over New York and New England, where warm tropical moisture was wrung from the atmosphere as it intersected colder air. In Nina's case, over a meter of rain fell within 24 hours.) Dams are deceptively complex structures which appear simple, and can be built with relatively simple technology and persist for long periods of time with little ongoing maintenance and administration ... until they cannot. Most especially, dams are especially prone to governmental dysfunction in oversight, regulation, maintenance, and emergency planning. That last should include planning, risk assessment, risk mitigating, public education about risks and procedures, warning systems, crisis communications (between dam operators and government, and dam operators and downstream communities), disaster drills, and training in rescue, recovery, and relief operations. Libya, a failing state divided by conflict, and for over forty years an autocratic dictatorship under a single ruler, lacks autonomous, independent, capable, and effective institutions for operating such infrastructure. It's all but certainly not the only such region. Even what are considered to be rich and well-functioning democratic states see dam failures, or near failures. The near-failure of the Oroville Dam in California in 2017 followed mismanagement by the state water authority. The actual failures of the Edensville and Sanford Dams in Michigan in 2020 followed years of mismanagement by a private owner and ineffective regulation by the Michigan Deparment of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy. In that case, property was damaged but no lives lost. Lake Dunlap in Texas suffered a spillway failure in 2019, again with ineffective management and regulation by this time by the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority, though again without loss of life. One of the highest-risk dams in the United States is Isabella Dam, on the Kern River upstream of Bakersfield, CA. The topography somewhat resembles the images I've seen of Derna: a mountainous upstream terrain, narrow canyon, and a city lying directly in the floodplain of both the river and any potential dam collapse. The problem presented by such dams with ongoing climate change is that all the factors involved compound: - Climate change increases risks of extreme weather events, including Mediterranean-basin cyclonic storms as with Daniel. - Climate-related stresses, including reduced crops and increased food prices, stress already-straining marginal states. The Arab Spring protests which ended up toppling Qaddafi's Libyan regime have been blamed in part on food stress from reduced harvests and increased food prices. - Governmental corruption and ineffectiveness raise all potential disaster threats. What would be a modest property-related disaster with preparation, warning, evacuation, and response becomes a mass fatality event where one or more element is missing. - Decreased liberal freedoms also tend to restrain technical concerns and criticisms. This was certainly the case at Banqiao, seems to be the case in Derna, and can be seen in other recent catastrophes such as the 2020 Beirut ammonium nitrate explosion (which also exhibited several other factors mentioned here). A core problem with disaster and risk planning is that often contributing factors which are treated as independent turn out to be strongly correlated and interrelated. I believe we're seeing that again here.
- alecfreudenberg 3y agoUnfortunately this is what happens when your infrastructure is nearly indistinguishable from a sandcastle
- vwcx 3y agoIf you're looking to read more into the basics of this disaster, I was impressed by the clarity of these Washington Post graphics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/12/deadly-libya-flooding-cause/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/12/deadly-libya...
- objektif 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't start flamewars here. You can make your substantive points without it, and we're trying for the opposite. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nurettin 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- q1w2 3y agoThis comment is in bad taste. You're making fun of their religion after they just suffered a catastrophe. Look in the mirror before posting comments like this.
- nurettin 3y agoI live with said religion. And the mirror looks absolutely fine.
- rus1000max 3y ago[dead]