Derna Dam & Locals

04th April 2024

It was a hot day. It was past the usual time of bus arrival at Derna stop. Sarah eagerly waited for Tareeq's bus to arrive, exams were on and she wished to be the first person to know how it was! Losing her patience, she called up Khaleed to kill time. He was in an important meeting and hence could not receive her call. As soon as the long meeting was over, he walked towards the cafeteria to grab something to drink as he unlocked his phone to call back Sarah. When Sarah informed Khaleed, it had already been an hour past the expected time of arrival. As Khaleed held his beverage in his hand, the news running on TV caught his attention. He could not believe his eyes. Sarah could sense the change in his tone as his attention was completely on TV, he was praying the school bus in the accident being shown should not be Tareeq's; But, unfortunately, he was wrong. It was Tareeq's bus.
Khaleed had a major outburst, he did not know how to break this news to Sarah. She was so eagerly and curiously waiting for Tareeq, how would he tell him he was never going to come? The news declared each passenger including the driver of the bus had died on the spot.

The scale of the catastrophe in Derna, a city of around 100,000 people, is massive. Yet its underlying causes are not unique. The disaster occurred at the confluence of sociopolitical instability wrought by civil war, a historic storm (likely by climate change), and neglected infrastructure: the destroyed dams, first constructed in the 1970s, had reportedly not been maintained since 2002. Similar conditions are replicated in many other places worldwide. In the aftermath of Derna’s dam collapses, experts are calling for renewed attention to the international problem of aging, ill-maintained dams.




Most of the world’s large dams were built in the decades following World War II, between about 1950 and 1985, says Duminda Perera, a civil engineer and risk assessment researcher at the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. These dams are important infrastructure that provides reliable drinking water, agricultural irrigation, flood control, and electricity to many. Yet dams—like all human-made structures—have a limited life span, degrade over time, and require upkeep.
Embankment dams—built from materials such as compacted clay, soil, and stone—are more common than their concrete counterparts because they’re cheaper, Shannon says. But they’re also even more vulnerable to degradation over time. Embankment dams erode internally as water eats through the center of the structure and pushes supporting material downstream. Without remediation, this results in seepages that can progress into cracks and eventually collapse.

How were parents, who just lost their 11-year-old were to be made this understood?

This post is a part of the #BlogchatterAtoZ challenge.