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00:00 We can now bring in our senior reporter,
00:02 Catherine Norris-Strand.
00:03 Catherine, great to see you as always.
00:05 Some 30,000 people have been displaced
00:08 in the aftermath of these floods.
00:09 What are some of the immediate needs for survivors?
00:12 The needs are absolutely huge.
00:14 I mean, as you can see on the scale of those pictures,
00:17 the hunt is still on for survivors.
00:19 They're still trying to move the rubble,
00:21 overturn cars, dig into collapsed buildings.
00:24 Time is running out, clearly.
00:26 There's been a delay in getting rescue teams
00:28 into the country and into the affected areas.
00:31 They need to clear roads.
00:32 It's a very complicated place to work in.
00:35 Libya is a complicated country.
00:36 Eastern Libya, all the more so.
00:38 We know that political divisions make that
00:42 especially difficult at times.
00:45 There are tens of thousands of people displaced,
00:47 as you said.
00:48 They need food, shelter, and water
00:51 because there is a real risk here
00:53 of the water supply in these areas getting polluted,
00:57 getting infected with basically the unburied dead bodies.
01:02 Excuse me for being graphic about this,
01:04 but this is a real risk going forward now,
01:06 a huge health risk.
01:08 They need to find the dead bodies and bury them.
01:10 That's why we're seeing these mass graves.
01:12 There is a shortage of body bags.
01:13 They're appealing for more body bags
01:15 so that they can prevent a secondary disaster here,
01:17 disease and further deaths from, well,
01:21 rotting corpses, really.
01:23 They're still being washed up on the coastline.
01:25 They're still being discovered everywhere.
01:27 The scale of this is enormous,
01:29 and so the humanitarian response,
01:31 it's coming in now, but it needs to be enormous as well.
01:34 - And the fact of the matter is we're hearing
01:36 from the UN agencies that most of these deaths
01:41 could have been avoided, and that tells us a lot
01:44 about the state of the infrastructure in Libya.
01:45 - It's incredibly, incredibly sad, isn't it?
01:48 You saw the head of the UN World Meteorological Organization
01:53 saying that if early warning systems
01:55 and if emergency management systems had worked properly,
01:59 most people could have survived.
02:01 If they'd been evacuated away from this valley
02:04 where the dams broke and the water rushed
02:07 through the floodwater basically like a tsunami there,
02:10 there has been, there were warnings put out
02:13 about the severe weather, but the evacuation,
02:15 the order doesn't seem to have been transmitted speedily.
02:18 It doesn't seem to have been carried out.
02:20 There are so many issues in Libya.
02:22 It's basically been a failed state since 2011,
02:26 since the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi,
02:30 and there've been rival governments,
02:32 there've been militias armed, groups in control.
02:34 There's been a chronic lack of underfunding,
02:37 of lack of maintenance of public bridges, buildings,
02:41 houses, dams, and this is what you're seeing here.
02:44 I mean, people in the east of Libya,
02:46 where I've traveled myself, would tell you
02:47 even before 2011 that they were neglected
02:51 by the government in the west of Libya,
02:52 by Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli,
02:55 and that he wasn't funding things there.
02:57 So there's perhaps decades of neglect going on here,
03:00 but clearly amid the very deteriorating security situation,
03:04 there's been years of conflict,
03:05 years of struggles between armed groups.
03:08 It's just not been maintained.
03:10 And so now there has been an announcement
03:12 from Libya's attorney general, who in theory,
03:15 on paper at least, has authority in the east
03:17 and in the west saying there should be a public inquiry,
03:20 and that is being backed up by various politicians
03:22 to try and find out what went on,
03:23 because we knew that this dam,
03:25 there were warnings from engineers
03:27 that these dams were in a bad state.
03:29 There are calls for a public inquiry
03:31 to see exactly who was to blame, what was to blame.
03:35 Whether that public inquiry will ever take place
03:38 is another thing.
03:39 I mean, this is a place where it's dysfunctional,
03:41 corruption is rife, and people a lot of the times
03:44 are left to fend for themselves.
03:45 - We'll see how people react.
03:48 Of course, those who've survived this tragedy.
03:51 Thank you very much for that, Catherine.
03:52 Catherine Norris, right there.