Storm Daniel might have missed Malta last weekend, but it had devastating effects on neighbouring Libya, dumping so much rain on its northeastern coast that two dams collapsed, sweeping entire neighbourhoods along with it.

“The death toll is huge and around 10,000 are reported missing,” Tamer Ramadan, head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) delegation in Libya, said Tuesday during a press briefing in Geneva.

As many as 2,000 people have already reportedly died in the “catastrophic” flooding, with parts of the eastern city of Derna being described as a “ghost town”. Other reports are already putting the unconfirmed death toll to 3,000.

“The bodies are still lying in many places,” Othman Abduljalil, health minister in Libya’s eastern parliament-backed government, told Libya’s Almasar TV yesterday evening. “There are families still stuck inside their homes and there are victims under the rubble… I expect people have been washed away into the sea, and tomorrow morning, we’ll find many of them.”

“The weather conditions were not studied well, the seawater levels and rainfall [were not studied], the wind speeds, there was no evacuation of families that could be in the path of the storm and in valleys,” Libya’s Emergency and Ambulance authority Osama Aly told CNN. “Libya was not prepared for a catastrophe like that. It has not witnessed that level of catastrophe before.”