DERNA: In Libya's flood-hit city of Derna, the Mediterranean Sea breeze mixes with the nauseating stench of human remains buried under the mud-caked rubble.
Ten days after a tsunami-scale flash flood ripped through the coastal city, razing entire neighbourhoods, many of the traumatised survivors are still waiting to learn the fate of missing relatives.
Few of them have any hope of seeing their loved ones alive.
Bodies are still trapped inside shattered buildings and below the mountains of mud now turning into choking dust, as emergency response crews keep up their grim search.
Untold numbers of people were swept away by the raging waters and into the sea when two upstream dams burst late at night after Storm Daniel's torrential rains lashed the area on September 10. Hundreds of bodies have since washed back onto the shores.
The official death toll stands at more than 3,300 -- but the eventual count is expected to be far higher, with international aid groups giving estimates of up to 10,000 people missing.
Entire families have vanished, said Derna resident Mohamad Badr as he was clearing his house of mud and trying to salvage what furniture and household items he could.
In the first days after the disaster, rescue teams and volunteers hastily buried hundreds of unidentified bodies in mass graves.
DNA samples were taken in the hopes they could be identified later, authorities said.
Elsewhere in the shattered city, Mahmud Erqiq, 50, has been offering drinking water and refreshments to the rescue workers.
With misty eyes, he also listed the names of neighbouring families of whom he has had no news.
Floods also inundated one of the country's premier ancient sites, threatening its UNESCO-listed monuments with collapse, a recent visitor and a leading archaeologist said.
The immediate damage to the monuments of Cyrene, which include the second century AD Temple of Zeus, bigger than the Parthenon in Athens, is relatively minor but the water circulating around their foundations threatens future collapses, the head of the French archaeological mission in Libya, Vincent Michel said.
Settled from the Greek island of Santorini around 600 BC, Cyrene was one of the leading centres of the Classical world for nearly a millennium before being largely abandoned following a major earthquake in 365 AD. Its name lives on in Cyrenaica, the historical name for eastern Libya.
UNESCO declared its surviving monuments a World Heritage Site in 1982. — AFP
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