Just days after Morocco experienced the worst earthquake in over 100 years, another North African neighbor is in the midst of a different kind of natural disaster.
Thousands of people are feared dead in eastern Libya after heavy flooding washed away entire neighborhoods and wrecked homes in multiple coastal towns. The city of Derna was effectively cut off completely from the rest of the country following the bursting of two aging dams. At least 700 recovered bodies have been buried so far, and Derna’s ambulance authority puts the current death toll at over 2,300.
The destruction of Derna and other parts of eastern Libya followed heavy rains from Mediterranean storm Daniel. Residents said they heard loud explosions and realized that dams outside the city were collapsing, unleashing flash floods down Wadi Derna, a river running from the mountains through the city and into the sea. The disintegration of these dams underscores the weakness of Libya’s infrastructure after more than a decade of upheaval. The oil-rich nation is divided between two rival administrations: one in the east and one in the west, each backed by different militias and foreign governments.
Since it’s becoming hard to keep track, here’s a short list of countries/areas that have seen catastrophic flooding in just the first 11 days of September 2023:
- Greece
- Turkey
- Libya
- Brazil
- Hong Kong
- Shanghai
- Spain
- Las Vegas
Side Items
Betting on 9/11?: Sports betting giant DraftKings issued a strange and hilarious apology yesterday after using the Sept. 11 terror attacks to persuade people to bet on baseball and football games. On the anniversary of the national tragedy that killed nearly 3,000 people, the Boston-based company offered users a 9/11-themed promotion that required three New York-based teams, the Yankees, Mets and Jets, to win their games yesterday, the 22nd anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. For the record, the Jets won, the Mets lost, and the Yankees had their game postponed altogether
Journalist vs. Billionaire: This article describes the journey Walter Isaacson has undergone for the last two years, preparing a biography for one of the richest idiots on the planet. Isaacson tortured himself by spending more than two years hanging around with Elon Musk in his factories and at his rocket-launch sites, interviewing well over a hundred people in his orbit and exchanging many bizarre late-night phone calls and text messages