This story first appeared on the website of NBC News’ partner Sky News.
DERNA, Libya — The center of the eastern city of Derna is like one big graveyard — a mass of flattened buildings, wrecked lives and upended vehicles amid torn trees.
Huge nine-story buildings have been ripped off their foundations and smothered by volumes of mud.
From where I’m standing, at least three huge bridges in the city center are leveled.
As we walk through the mountains of rubble, boulders and rocks, we have to keep reminding ourselves these were once people’s homes — this was once a street packed with shops and malls. Even the road is now nonexistent.
A few hours after daybreak and there are small groups of civilians, some with just pickaxes, trampling over the boulders and rubble left in Derna center in the wake of Storm Daniel.
They tell us they’ve traveled from Tobruk and Misrata and Benghazi to help in what must be a truly awful task.
Six days on, they’re among several small groups setting out to try to locate their missing relatives who are included in the thousands still unaccounted for — more than 10,000 at the last count.
There are a few groups of soldiers too, as well as pockets of health workers dressed in blue hospital gowns and wearing masks to save them from the stench of death that hangs over this whole area.
The steaming heat has meant the corpses they’re finding are putrid after almost a week of decomposing.
They carry body bags. Few here still hold out hope of finding anyone alive.
A structural engineer in Derna — the east Libyan city torn apart by extreme flooding — has told us the catastrophic disaster was down to negligence.
“They should have known,” Gandi Mohammed Hammoud said as he looked aghast at his city’s devastation.
He said he watched as his neighbors and friends screamed in terror while the torrent of water tore apart their homes and flats.
“Then it went silent — which means they died,” he tells us. “We saw some friends literally being swept away in front of us.”
Hammoud says there had been plenty of warnings from engineers about the poor state of the city’s two dams and how several more needed to be built to halt the water caused by increasingly heavy yearly rainfall.
“Nothing has been done since 2008 and after the revolution to strengthen the two dams,” he told us.
The instability, poor governance, corruption and mafia-style politicking, including a network of people-smuggling gangs, have all conspired to make this tragedy.
Many Libyans believe the bombing during the NATO-backed military campaign to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi also weakened the structures.
“Someone should pay for these deaths,” Hammoud said. “Someone should be held accountable for what happened here.”
This story first appeared on the website of NBC News’ partner Sky News.