Aid groups have warned of a "second humanitarian crisis" in the flood-devastated eastern Libyan city of Derna as the risk of water-borne diseases and shortages of food, shelter and medicine" is growing.

"Thousands of people don't have anywhere to sleep and don't have food," Salah Aboulgasem, Islamic Relief's deputy director of partner development, said Friday.

"In conditions like this, diseases can quickly spread as water systems are contaminated," he added.

"With this type of event we can really worry about water-related disease," Doctors Without Borders medical coordinator in Derna Manoelle Carton said, adding that efforts to coordinate aid is "chaotic."

Last week's flood submerged the port city of Derna, washing thousands of people and homes out to sea after two upstream dams burst under the pressure of torrential rains triggered by the hurricane-strength storm.

Conflicting death tolls have been reported, with officials in the east of the divided country giving different estimates, and one speaking of at least 3,840 dead.

The International Organization for Migration, meanwhile, said "over 38,640" people had been left homeless in eastern Libya, 30,000 of them in Derna alone.

Teams from the Libyan Red Crescent are "still searching for possible survivors and clearing bodies from the rubble in the most damaged areas" of the city, its spokesperson Tawfik Shoukri told Agence France-Presse.

Other teams were trying to deliver much-needed aid to families in the eastern part of Derna, which had been spared the worst of the flooding but was cut off by road, he added.

In a Friday night news conference, Ahmed al-Mesmari, the spokesperson for east-based military strongman Khalifa Haftar pointed to "enormous needs for reconstruction."

The United Nations launched an appeal for more than $71 million to assist hundreds of thousands in need and warned the "extent of the problem" remains unclear.

"We don't know the extent of the problem," UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said Friday in Geneva, as he called for coordination between Libya's two rival administrations — the UN-backed, internationally recognized government in Tripoli, and one based in the disaster-hit east.

WITH AFP