As Sunday night wore on, the rain got heavier. Sirens sounded.

“It really began about 2.30am,” Amna Al Ameen Absais, a 23-year-old medical student born and raised in Derna, said in a phone interview from the nearby city of Tobruk.

“The noise was getting much louder. My brother said he could see water covering the street.”

As the water rose, the neighbours began to migrate upstairs. Amna grabbed the cat and four passports and they went up from their first floor apartment to a third floor apartment.

“People were looking outside into the dark, praying,” she said.

Then the water reached the third floor.

“Everyone started screaming. We moved up again, to the fifth floor and finally up to the seventh floor.”

Panic had set in. “I lost the cat,” Amna said.

“I lost my little brother for a minute but then I found him. I realised we could not even stay on the seventh floor, we had to go to the rooftop.”

From there, they could see neighbours on the roof of a three-storey building opposite, including a family with whom they were friends. The neighbours were waving their phone torches. Moments later, their entire building collapsed into the water in the dark.

Read more tales from survivors here.