Amrane Al-Gababaili was crying. Crouching on an unstable slab held together by concrete rings dangling in the air, his gaze was fixed on the abyss before him: piles of rubble, broken walls and bricks scattered in the mud several meters below. Neither words of comfort nor attempts by volunteers to pull him away, hoping to offer him some respite, succeeded in pulling the man out of his misery. Since the storm swept away 15 members of his family – his three brothers, sisters-in-law, nephews and nieces, buried just a stone's throw away – the agricultural police officer has not left the scene. Even though he is convinced that all hope is lost: "Can you smell it? They're all dead. There's nothing more to be done. It's all over." The beige of his uniform blended in with the surrounding dust. All around him was bleak desolation for dozens of meters.

With the exception of a few gutted buildings on the verge of collapse, the Swissi neighborhood on the left bank of the Wadi Derna was obliterated during the night of Sunday, September 10. "The whole area is underground," Al-Gababaili added, pointing to the ground, before listing the names of houses that have now disappeared by the last names of their former owners. Did he see any rescue teams pass by? "Yes, then they left again...," he recalled, staggering away with one of the thousands of small bottles of water distributed by the military on the outskirts of the area.

Higher up, young volunteers were getting back into the swing of things. Four of them from the town – Ossama, Mahmoud, Islam and Odeil – also sometimes feel quite alone. But they've been busy since day one with their mission of keeping the thin strip of dirt between the two banks of Wadi Derna as passable as possible. By day and by night.

"We're trying to open up access routes. The town was isolated. Cut in two by the flood. The emergency services simply couldn't get through," explained 20-year-old Ossama, who recounted the terror of the first 48 hours. "The priority was to rescue people. Even though hundreds of bodies were scattered along the wadi bed. We even had to use the bulldozer's shovel to transport them."

He and his friends are the lucky ones. On the evening of the disaster, when they set off after midnight to consolidate dykes and embankments as the waters began to rise, they thought they were facing an event equivalent to the one they had witnessed in 2011. Flooding filled the riverbed but did not overflow into the streets and alleyways of the neighboring areas. "The dam [the first is 1 km upstream from the town] still held back the water," recalled Ossama.

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