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SOUSSA, Libya – The white walls of Alaam Sadaawi’s home are stained red with the muddy handprints left by his wedding guests, which they desperately clung to as floodwaters rose around them.
His family had been planning the party for weeks. His father Mayloud, 70, bought silver trays for the food and new cups for sweet tea.
On Friday, they were buried in the red mud left by Storm Daniel as it roared down the valley, blanketing this town of 8,000 in eastern Libya. According to the family, it took 15 men to remove the layers of dirt from the marble floors. The trauma will be harder to erase.
Alaam, the groom, was recovering in a nearby town when Washington Post reporters visited the home. The bride was with her family. They never had their wedding anniversary.
“We are afraid of the rain now,” said Nizar, Alaam’s brother, standing in what was left of their kitchen.
A disaster of “mythical proportions” occurs in flood-ravaged eastern Libya
Up to 20,000 people could die in this war-divided country, victims of a perfect storm of extreme weather and government neglect. While rescue workers search for the missing and bury the dead, the survivors bear their own wounds.
When two poorly maintained dams burst Sunday, lashing unsuspecting towns and villages with a massive wall of water, they shook up both ordinary evenings and special occasions.
In Derna, the hardest-hit city, two newlyweds were found dead under their stairs, the bride in her dress and the groom in his suit. Outside a maternity hospital on Thursday, two brothers searched for their sister and newborn after their house was washed away.
“This is a tragedy where climate and capacity collided,” U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths said at a briefing in Geneva on Friday. The U.N. humanitarian office sent a 15-member disaster coordination team from the earthquake zone in Morocco to Libya as the region was hit by two disasters, he said.
“In Libya we don’t know the extent of the problem,” Griffiths said. “The floods, the torrents, the destroyed buildings and the mud still hide the extent of the suffering and death.”
Doctors Without Borders said its representatives visited three health centers in Derna and found one was out of order because almost all of its medical staff had died. The other two operated with volunteer doctors from Tripoli but asked for more support, the group said, “mainly for mental health, to support the people coming to the center.”
Learn why Libya’s floods were so deadly with maps and videos
There was a frenetic energy in downtown Derna on Friday as Post reporters returned for the second straight day. Concerned officers with walkie-talkies cleared the streets, worried that a high-ranking official was on the move. There were rumors about who it could be.
Aid trucks were more visible than the day before, cell phone service was restored and Air Force officers were directing traffic. Hundreds of men in military uniforms and fluorescent coats lined the boulevards in formation.
In other coastal communities, the mood was more subdued as residents continued cleanup efforts and excavators combed the rubble for bodies. In Soussa, 60 miles west of Derna, the Sadaawi family remembered the happy, nervous energy in the house that Sunday evening, which now seemed so long ago.
Relatives were crowded in every room, children were excited to see their cousins, and adults were ready to prepare the feast. They slaughtered 13 sheep for the wedding planned for Thursday, then lit the barbecue that evening and ate together under the pomegranate trees in their garden.
Inside the house, festive lanterns glowed from the ceiling and the youngest cousins played musical chairs in their party dresses. Alaam’s oldest brother, Najm, was running final errands in his car when it began to rain.
The downpour pelted the city’s flat concrete roofs and vast green orchards. By 11:30 p.m. the water was rushing down the valley and through the entrance gates. “It happened in a matter of seconds,” recalls 40-year-old Nizar.
The lights went out and the music stopped. The children froze.
By Friday evening, the authorities in Soussa counted ten dead, 50 missing and 200 injured. Dozens of houses had slipped into the sea or been torn apart, and the rubble was scattered from shore to shore. Apparently only a few aid groups have reached the area.
In the Saadawi family home, muddy handprints covered almost every wall, rising along the stairs the family climbed as the water rose higher and faster. Some of the prints were small. “We just grabbed the kids and threw them up there,” Nizar said.
They all made it to the top floor, the water was up to their necks. Alaam said he and the other men held the children above their heads. Neighbors screamed from the rooftops as a family of six was swept away. At that time, the groom was sure that he would die.
They were saved when the kitchen wall collapsed, Nizar said, and water rushed into the courtyard where they had been eating. The flood slowly receded, gently depositing wedding pots, pans and lanterns onto the muddy ground. It was as if a terrible ghost had left the room, said a friend.
Soaked to the skin and deep in shock, Nizar slapped his hands on his head. “It felt like a dream,” he remembers.
On Friday, the memories were everywhere. A briefcase containing banknotes that would have been intended as a wedding present was drying on a bed. Scarlet chairs were stacked on the roof for guests.
In Libyan culture, the groom’s father traditionally pays the cost of the wedding. Mayloud now lives in the ruins of a day that should be proud. But his children were alive, he said, and that was the main thing.
“This stuff wouldn’t mean anything if they were hurt,” he said, glancing through the broken kitchen wall at the stove sitting in the mudflats of the yard.
With winter approaching, they needed to repair the house but didn’t know how they would afford it. “We only receive monthly salaries,” Najm said. “We will stay in this house as it is.”
Nobody in Soussa has slept much since the flood. Many people see rain in their nightmares.