Between the Mountains and the Sea

When Storm Daniel made landfall in eastern Libya in September 2023, extreme rainfall overwhelmed the Wadi Derna watershed and triggered the collapse of the Abu Mansour and Al-Bilad dams. The resulting flood unleashed millions of cubic metres of water through the city of Derna, destroying entire neighbourhoods and causing one of the deadliest disasters in modern Libyan history While the storm was the immediate trigger, the scale of destruction cannot be explained by weather alone. Derna's topography, decades of aging and poorly maintained infrastructure, and years of political instability all contributed to the catastrophe. This StoryMap explores how physical geography, governance, and human decision-making interacted across multiple scales to transform an extreme weather event into a devastating human disaster