Floods have always punctuated Derna's history. This is why the municipality had two dams built upstream. However, the power of Cyclone Daniel was in no way comparable to even the most paroxysmal episodes the city experienced. Daniel marked Libya's entry into the uncertain future of climate change.

But above all, it revealed the extent to which this future is heavily compromised, as is the present by explosive legacies that considerably amplified the tragedy. These are neither solely nor primarily those of the civil war that followed the fall of Gaddafi. Instead, they go back to the chaos of his reign, the echoes of which can be found in today's chaos. And directly in the Derna disaster.

The dams, whose collapse multiplied the effects of the cyclone with the instantaneous release of millions of cubic meters of stored water, had not been inspected or maintained since 2003! In other words, almost a decade before the fall of Gaddafi. Their state of neglect for 20 years inevitably contributed to their fragility. Although the dams were no longer maintained, a budget line continued to be allocated to them each year and to be reported as completed!

It illustrates a system that has made national resources proprietary and where positions of responsibility, awarded on the basis of tribal allegiances, were conceived primarily as a means of gaining access to these resources. It was a system where short-term predation, clientelist interference and populist whims affected the environment to the point of transforming it into a danger.

By the middle of the 2000s, less than 30 years after they were built, these dams were more than 50% silted up. These millions of cubic meters of silt have made the infrastructure more fragile. More importantly, they became a weapon of mass destruction, the sudden release of which has made flooding more aggressive and harmful. The muddy blanket covering the city was largely the result of this neglect.

This silting-up was due to the intense erosion of the watershed, the exploitation of which had become a power issue. In a green region of arid Libya but also an area hostile to the government, authorities excessively encouraged the activity of its supporters, cultivating divisions and competition around it to the point of, amid conflict, grazing lands, farms, and buildings multiplied, generating intense erosion that silted up the dams.

The anarchic urbanization of Derna, mainly based on self-building without delimitation of dangerous or non-buildable zones, also contributed significantly to the increase in the number of victims. This anarchy, resulting from a total lack of regulation, was the culmination of Gaddafi's destruction of the institutional and bureaucratic machinery, potential areas of "technocratic resistance" to his rule.

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