From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Why is a so-called Science Editor allowed to get away with writing drivel like this?
On the face of it there is a clear explanation for the tragedy in Derna.
Two dams across the river that runs through the city were too old and too weak to cope with an unusually heavy rainstorm.
But there’s another story written in the stinking channels of mud that carved through Derna‘s high-rises and low-lying neighbourhoods: that vulnerable places and their people will suffer the most through our failure to recognise and respond to the risks of a rapidly warming climate.
The floods were a direct result of the failure of the two dams up stream of Derna, which were built in the 1970s by a Yugoslavian company (hardly a recipe for success!). Experts say that when the dams broke, 30 million cubic metres of water was released into the city.
Neither dam has had any maintenance for over 20 years.
Before the dams were built, there would only have been minimal flooding of course.
The storm which triggered the collapse was merely a catalyst for a disaster that was waiting to happen, and there is not a single piece of evidence to suggest that climate change had anything to do with it at all.
Instead of printing Clarke’s pack of lies, maybe Sky should have told its viewers the real story:
Clarke goes on to claim that this is an example of how poor countries are most at risk from climate change. What the dolt really means is that they are more vulnerable to all natural disasters, weather and otherwise. That is why it is so important to make their economies richer and infrastructure stronger, by giving them the freedom to use fossil fuels.
That is why the death toll from natural disasters has shrunk to close to zero in recent years:
Wasn’t this a result of – inattention to proper dam maintenance? There was a white paper written about that too, a few years back even …
“Everything” is due to CC … one of the latest bone-chilling statements from Josh Green Hawaii´s governor is that the world should apologize for the Maui fires.
Does the Guv live in a mansion? Does he island hop by hydrocarbon powered craft? Is he interested in any human failures including his own connected to the fires?
Idk and Idc … and propably 100% not he falls under the “wordsalad” BBB, build back better and/or build beyond barriers, “housing is healthcare”.
… And looking at the video posted to the article, we know that Derna was hit by flooding in 1941, 1959 and 1968, why the statement, it´s CC, is a “false flag”, thereby, again, as it was at Maui, lack of human ingenuity and engineering, (un)purposely or not.
Daily 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs can do a lot of physical damage, in addition to their radioactivity. It’s surprising that anyone actually still lives in Hawaii due to the boiling oceans.
The story of the Maldives … AGW 101 = identify a minority, tell them CC is threatening their life, tell the world that Capitalism is causing CC, promise those minorities $$ for the damage (that hasn’t and won’t be realized), demonize the West as the cause. Free money, who would say no?
Libya is not known for having a stable government, especially after Hilary Clinton played with regime change.
They’re also now known for slave markets, in addition to floods. But, hey, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
The woman has a black thumb as far as results.
A centuries old tradition going back to Roman times I think. Perhaps before. And Barbary pirates spent centuries abducting slaves from Europe. Even the US got fed up with them and took them on in 1805 at the Battle of Derna.
I was about to make a similar comment as at least one report mentioned that there were plans 2007-08 for maintaining the dams but were not implemented due to Hilary’s regime change. Ironic in that Hilary C. caused far more death and destruction the recent hurricane Hilary.
I won’t hold my breath for Lame Stream Media to hold Hilary C accountable.
I think Hillary wanted to destroy one positive outcome of GW Bush’s invasion of Iraq, that Qaddafi agreed to destroy his nuclear program, with the understanding the US would leave his regime alone.
and Gaddafi annouced hed trade oil for gold and that signed his fate, cant upset the us$hegemony can we?
if the BRICS guys get their act together..I cant wait;-)
yup not only did the quality of life drop after that cow murdered gaddafi (say what you like he ran the country FOR the peoples benefit) the aftermath and stuffing up another nation also enabled the massive flowthrough Gaddafi kept at bay and the invasion of EU italy greece right now is a direct result of usa interfering
Yes those bombs and missiles were released over Libya from those NATO aircraft by climate change
Ursula FondOfFlying would agree with that!
There are also cellphone cameras and the Internet everywhere so that weather disasters that were seldom reported in the past now make headline news.
Oh – you mean, we’re lucky someone’s mobile phone camera was pointing in the right direction otherwise we would have missed 11,000 lives being destroyed in a (NATO) man made flood?
I looked at the satellite images of the dams, which are highly visible because water levels were very low when the images were made. Here’s the upstream one:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/sCA7HZhdYYuLJ9Fu5
and here’s the one on the outskirts of Derna itself
https://maps.app.goo.gl/JVEjtyrJGnm7MXaH9
Both show vegetation and erosion/cracking of concrete on the faces of the dam. Neither has a formal spillway – the dam is simply overtopped and the roadway across submerged. Water getting into the dam core would see it collapse. There is only a small horn shaped opening to a bypass tunnel that would be quite inadequate when the wadi fills – which can happen at shocking speed, as my own experience in Fujairah many years ago attests – we only made it out by being in a bus with a good ground clearance, sufficient to get across the submerged bridge over a wadi.
Lack if dam maintenance is of course not just a Libyan problem. The UK had a near disaster at Whaley Bridge not so long back, and the US likewise: the Oroville dam problems being a memorable recent example.
The dams were constructed of compacted clay. No concrete involved.
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/failed-dams-wadi-derna-libya
Both Derna dams were made of compacted earth with a concrete core to prevent leakage. Both had “glory hole” spillways where the water spills into a vertical shaft that leads under the dam. If the water flow is greater than the spillway capacity the water can rise and top the structure.
The southern-most dam’s glory hole is here:
32.65857, 22.577859 [Lat/Long on Google Earth]
All visible on the map links I posted.
Overtop either of those dams, and the earth at the front will be washed away leaving the concrete core unsupported against upstream pressure.
Guaranteed to fail !!
At least Oroville had decent spillways designed.
It just wasn’t implemented or build very well.
These dams in Libya don’t even have proper overflow spillways.
Considering they were built to stop floods, that is an unbelievable thing to leave out !
Amazing how media spins stories like thes. Both the UN and WMO are on record announcing this was NOT due to climate change, but rather caused by the coup and lack of maintenance.
What he really means is that Western advanced societies should pay trillions to 3rd world countries because you know equity err to help them mitigate the changes in the climate caused by advanced countries burning fossil fuels – more communist clap trap
Entomology is not what I would consider a numerate science. He’s going to struggle to make sense of a subject confected entirely from statistics—often novel statistics.
Entomology? That’s bugs. I’ll go with etymology. Agree otherwise.
Bugs. From his LinkedIn profile.
Clearly building a city in the middle of multiple flash flood zones had NOTHING to do with this disaster. Add to the poorly planned location building substandard dams and then NOT MAINTAINING them and of course it is all the fault of humans. These leftarded morons at sky are just too stupid to figure out the REAL causes of this disaster.
The city is on the coast, and Mediterranean tides are no problem being limited in range. It has been there since antiquity – I.e. at least Greco-Roman times. The wadi forms a deep ravine and has provided water. The dams are more recent, and properly maintained and managed would not have been so much of a problem. Without them there would have been little flooding. However dam collapse released a massive reservoir of water that also destroyed the lower dam.
Yes, the Old City sections of Derna were not built in the bottoms of the wadi, the modern sections and expanded “slum” areas were built in the well-known flash flood zones in wadi bottoms. When you stand at lowest point and look up the sides and see the clear evidence of how high flash floods had been in past what would possess you to build there? As for the dams, what moron would build packed earth/clay dams above a large populated area? The same kind of moron who would build in a well know and historically documented flash flood zone. There is zero defense for this stupidity.
The underlying cause of mass death from flooding in Libya is the destruction of that nation by a NATO-directed regime change operation in 2011. The perpetrators behind it, and the murder of its leader, Muammar Ghadaffi — UK PM Cameron, French President Sarkozy, and U.S. Pres. Obama — have never been held accountable for their crimes. Ghadaffi’s crime, in their eyes, was his unwillingness to allow western-backed jihadists to tear apart his country. Neither the BBC, nor any MSM, will tell the truth; nor will they tell the truth about the uprising underway against neo-colonialism in the Global South.
Ghadaffi wanted a new Currency to replace France’s CFA, recently in the news again with BRICS11 and a series of coup’s. Libya had even ordered French nuclear reactors. The US AfriCom was not ready in Germany, so NATO was tasked to tear the country apart, no infrastructure or resue services function.
All MSM is using “climate” to cover for mass murder by Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama, as well as grinning Hillary Clinton “We came, we conquered, he died”.
Good summary. How’s the ‘NATO-directed regime change operation in 2011’, er, 2014 going, I wonder?
Only an other $150 billion and it should be done, yet again, before the election, any day now.
Meanwhile 500,000 casualties, but, hey, they are cheap, no expensive US boots on the ground (officially, they all died from holiday accidents, COVID jabs, suicides).
Don’t forget mountaineering falls in the French Alps – the Europeans aren’t being left out of Barbarossa 2.0.
Inevitably an inadequate representation of a much more complex history that in the case of the US goes back as far as its first overseas battle – of Derna as luck would have it, in 1805 against Barbary pirates.
Gaddafi was no angel, starting with his military ouster of King Faisal in 1970, and continuing with adventures in courting Soviet support, providing arms and assistance to the IRA, etc. He was nearly taken out by Reagan in 1987, but the bombs only killed a couple of his wives. Perhaps it was intended as a warning. His revenge was the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing.
The Libyan adventures were part of the failure of the much wider Arab Spring interventions that were meant to install pro Western regimes across the Arab world. Some of that was to counter the increasing Russian and Chinese influence as well as the proxy Sunni/Shia war between the Wahhabi and the mullahs of Iran, which makes a change from Greeks, Romans, Phoenecians, Turks etc. or the interludes when local tribes were the aggressors with the Barbary being the most notable for their far flung capture of slaves. It was a bad misstep, born of idealism and not realism and of poor intelligence understanding of local conditions all across the Maghreb. Libya has returned to historic tribal division.
In geopolitics everyone must play or lose by default. Maintaining stability has to be counted as at least not losing, and that applies to the other players as much as ourselves.
Of course the angel’s in D.C. London, are hallowed.
MI6 admitted the method used to assassinate Diana was tried first on Ghadaffi and they then failed.
Ghadaffi’s “crime” was to industrialize.
China’s “high crime” was to industrialize leaving the US far behind.
OMG the world is full of criminal’s, authoritarians industrializing – how dare they!”
Harrumph – look at the CO2!
I did not describe Western politicians as angels, but as originators of failed policies. Not sure where your deep dive down conspiracy theory dreams up your story about Diana. I note you ignore Ghadaffi’s wanton attacks and the many other factors taht go to make up the mess. Life is not as simple as you would like it to be.
So the fact that Ghadaffi backed terrorists and was directly responsible for the Lockerbie bombing, had nothing to do with it. It was all western industrialists.
Reagan ordered the attack on Daffy to avenge the Libyan bombing of a West German night club, in which two US soldiers and a Turkish woman were killed and many maimed and wounded:
https://www.britannica.com/event/West-Berlin-discotheque-bombing-1986
Then ‘Daffy’ hit back with the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew & 11 residents = total 270.
So what does that tell us ?
In cases of retribution Ghadaffi believed in payback with interest. Not just an eye for an eye.
It tells us that we should have made sure to kill Ghadaffie, rather than just send a warning.
We would have got him, but for having to avoid flying over France. Then France ordered Hillary to kill him. Strange.
I heard tell that France aquired a LOT of gold as Gaddafi got killed…hmm
and it seems a few mil/bil of ukies gold vanished after maidan toward ussa from accounts around at the time
regime overthrow makes some very rich
hmm like usa stealing 800bil barrels of oil a day from Syria for the last few yrs as well?
The wadi is an ancient naturally formed feature that predates Derna. A wadi is an often dry gulley in desert regions formed by sporadic extreme rainfall events. They built a town, discovered it suffered occasional flooding from said events, and tried to solve the problem by holding back the water with not very sophisticated dams that needed monitoring, managing and maintenance. Then the country became a basket case and the dams were forgotten, only for a recent assessment that warned of the risk of an imminent catastrophic cascading failure and flood based on known expected historical extreme rainfall events. As predicted the top dam failed, the surge and debris took out the second dam and released the entire rainfall for the catchment in one instant.
Yes this was a man-made disaster, but not from climate change.
See my post #3 here.
https://joannenova.com.au/2023/09/thursday-23/#comment-2700136
The city was built in ancient times precisely because the wadi concentrated the water supply and it offered a harbour location. The dams were built in part to try to enhance the water supply, rather than leave it to run into the sea. A very late addition in the history.
The link I included has far more information.
“So, in the 1960s studies indicated that the dams should be constructed to protect the city. The dams were constructed in the 1970s by a Yugoslavian company. “
Whenever I get constipated, it is a result of climate change. I know this because before the climate was changing, I never got constipated. The same can be said about the Libyan floods.
Remember, all climate science writers now say that correlation equals causation. It makes writing about current events so much easier.
It’s a bit harsh to blame the builders. The dams lasted half a century. And they have not been maintained for a third of their lifetime.
It’s not a installation fault. It’s a maintenance fault.
This is important. Many governments can get funding for a one-off capital investment with a glamorous opening and lots of chances for rewarding their backers through big contracts.
But then they cannot maintain the political will to raise the taxes for ongoing investment.
And that’s not just a Third World problem.
The rich West is also suffering from collapsing infrastructure due to austerity.
I do think the design was on the cheap. Construction techniques were a bit rudimentary, and spillway provision was plainly inadequate. Happens all 9ver the world. I have been following the troubled Hidro Ituango project in Colombia for years now. It’s still a mess, and very nearly a disaster.
The 2017 Oroville dam spillway collapse would support what you suggest. This too was a case of maintenance neglected for years and not a function of the construction of the dam. But it’s not austerity. Western governments have all kinds of money to waste on useless things.
FYP
A direct result of the destruction of the Libyan state is the migrant crisis hitting Italy right now.
Of course MSM opines they are climate migrants.
Not to mention the US migrant crisis.
And recently :
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/europe/article/2023/09/02/italian-ex-premier-asserts-french-missile-accidentally-downed-airliner-in-1980-in-bid-to-kill-gadhafi_6120906_143.html
I now realize my grandfather died due to climate change.
He died in 1962 from a heart attack, but if it weren’t for CO2’s devastating effects, he would still be alive today. It’s settled science. Probably.
I’m suing Exxon.
Wadis are well known and feared for strong water flow in case of rain.
Very true for the arroyos, gullies and gulches in the western US deserts, hence the very well known term “flash flood”.
Maybe climate/weather ranks about the same as maintenance of infrastructure on the list of Libyan priorities, as there are no easily accessible records for the country. There is, however, a record of precipitation for Marsa Matruh, a few hundred km away in Egypt, available at https://www.data.jma.go.jp/gmd/tcc/tcc/products/climate/climatview/graph_mkhtml.php?n=62306&y=2023&m=8&s=1&r=0&e=0&k=0&d=0
I hope the chart attachment works, because it shows no apparent indication of precipitation becoming more erratic (or even greater) since 1982.
As usual, Sky News and the rest of the media members of the political class want to blame Climate Change for the disasters of wretched governance.
Paul Homewood has unearthed catastrophic flooding in Tunisia in 1973 and even worse in 1969.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/09/17/the-great-tunisian-flood-of-1969/
I was surprised when the news first broke that certain news outlets were not immediately blaming climate change.
Even the BBC has produced much more rounded analysis than the usual CC mania. If that doesn’t indicate that it has absolutely no credible direct connection whatsoever?!
BBC’s initial report (seen on overseas transmissions World Service), specifically blamed Climate Change.
How responsible is Hillary ” we came, we saw, he died” Clinton who instigated the civil war that led to the collapse of any operational Libyan government?
The risk was identified last year
https://doi.org/10.51984/jopas.v21i2.2137
its hard to compare with previous storms, but Derna only recorded 73 mm, only 13% more than 37 years ago, and half of that in 1945. The catchment area appears to have gotten 100 mm at most while elsewhere in Libya, well away from the disaster, there was 400 mm.
Purely I’ll prepared for rainfall that doesn’t just appear to be a one in 40 year event, it looks like it happens every 40 years or so.
Yes I/my link mentioned it, also that most of the downpour was over the sea according to the BBC graphic.
The trouble is, the simple message rubs off on most people who aren’t all that interested in the detailed analysis of rainfall totals, catchment area runoff, etc.
I just heard a conversation on the radio station LBC. A caller phoned in to praise Rishi Sunak for pushing back (slightly) on some aspects of the “net-zero” legislation, but the hysterical lady presenting the program shouted him down, saying that the Libyan flood was 50 times more likely because of human induced climate change.
A very sad state of affairs
Even the Ecologist Magazine reported this :War crime: NATO deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure Nafeez Ahmed 14th May 2015 https://theecologist.org/2015/may/14/war-crime-nato-deliberately-destroyed-libyas-water-infrastructure
“The deliberate destruction of a nation’s water infrastructure, with the knowledge that doing so would result in massive deaths of the population as a direct consequence, is not simply a war crime, but potentially a genocidal strategy.”
BBC got a Community Note for omitting NATO’s culpability :
https://twitter.com/NinaByzantina/status/1702505449172713777
Id hope Andrew Bolt sails into the daft broad and sets it to rights, amazed sky let it go actually