U.N. says most Libya flooding deaths could have been avoided, as officials warn the toll could still soar

The number of people killed by the devastating flash flooding in northern Libya remained unclear Thursday, due to the daunting scale of the catastrophe and political chaos that's left the African nation divided between two governments for years, but it was undoubtedly well into the thousands. With survivors still desperately hoping to find the bodies of lost loved ones in debris-choked towns and cities, the United Nations said most of the thousands of deaths could have been avoided.

With better functioning coordination in the crisis-wracked country, "they could have issued the warnings and the emergency management forces would have been able to carry out the evacuation of the people, and we could have avoided most of the human casualties," Petteri Taalas, head of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, told reporters.

An enormous surge of water, brought by torrential downpours from Storm Daniel over the weekend, burst two upstream river dams and reduced the city of Derna to an apocalyptic wasteland where entire blocks and untold numbers of people were washed into the Mediterranean Sea.