After around a month of reconstruction work, the Derna seawater desalination plant in Libya is back in service. The plant was restarted by the Arabian Gulf Oil Company (AGOCO) on 10 October, 30 days after storm Daniel hit the city on the country’s Mediterranean coast. The facility was restored by Zueitina Oil Company, an oil and gas company based in the capital Tripoli.
The relaunched seawater desalination plant has a daily capacity of 40,000 m3. The water from the plant serves some 320,000 people, who were exposed for several weeks to increased risks of diarrhoea and cholera, dehydration and malnutrition, particularly children.
In addition, cases of poisoning from unsafe water rose from 55 children in mid-September to 150 before the Derna seawater desalination plant came back on line, forcing the National Centre for Disease Control to declare a state of emergency for an entire year in the flood-affected regions of eastern Libya.
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In Denra, two dams on the coastal river Wadi Derna also broke under the weight of the waters on the night of 10/11 September. The upper dam had a storage capacity of 1.5 million m3, while the lower dam could hold 22.5 million m3 of water. Witnesses said that the water reached almost 3 m in places, reported BBC Afrique in an article published five days after the Derna tragedy.
Clearly, much remains to be done to stabilise the water network in the stricken city, where the humanitarian response is being stepped up in the wake of storm Daniel.
Inès Magoum