Earthquake rescue efforts have continued in Morocco as the country began three days of mourning for the victims of a disaster that killed more than 2,000 people, flattening buildings in cities and villages.
Friday’s 6.8-magnitude quake, Morocco’s strongest on record, had its epicentre in a remote cluster of mountainous villages 45 miles south of Marrakech, destroying clusters of clay and cement housing and shaking infrastructure far away on the country’s northern coast.
The government reported at least 2,012 people were killed and more than 2,059 injured, many of them critically. In Marrakech, many people slept outside on pavements and in squares, fearing returning to their homes. As rescue efforts stretched into a critical second day, military forces and emergency services rushed to reach the remote villages strewn with debris where many more victims were feared trapped.
Morocco’s King Mohammed VI chaired an emergency disaster response meeting on Saturday afternoon, declaring three days of national mourning due to the crisis. Civil protection units were deployed to increase stocks in blood banks and ensure the supply of vital resources including water, food, tents and blankets to affected areas, the palace said in a statement.
The Moroccan armed forces deployed rescue teams to areas destroyed by the quake in the hope of finding survivors trapped under the rubble of their homes, many in isolated villages that dot the Atlas mountains across al-Haouz province.
Some affected areas were so remote, it added, that officials told the king that relief efforts were impossible until after sunrise, hours after the earthquake struck shortly after 11pm local time on Friday night.
“This region, outside of any natural disaster and on a normal day, is one of the most difficult regions to get to as the infrastructure is so poor. Roads and access to this region are already difficult, before you compound that with difficulties like rubble or problems with the roads. It’s going to take a miracle to get immediate aid there,” said Samia Errazzouki, an expert in the history and governance of the Moroccan state at Stanford University in California.
“These regions have historically been hit with earthquakes, but they have also been marginalised. In moments when people requested, demanded aid, infrastructure and development like in the Hirak movement in 2017, those who do so are thrown in jail,” she said.
“Development projects in Morocco are concentrated in urban areas, the train system doesn’t go further south than Marrakech. On a good day, this region is difficult to access and deprived of basic infrastructure – the hospital system there is abysmal.”
Several countries, including Israel, France, Spain, Italy and the US, have offered aid. Neighbouring Algeria, which has had difficult relations with Morocco, opened its airspace, which had been closed for two years, to flights carrying humanitarian aid and the injured.
Al-Haouz province, at the epicentre of the earthquake, suffered the most deaths with 1,293 followed by the province of Taroudant with 452. Morocco’s geophysical centre said the quake was centred in Ighil in al-Haouz with a magnitude of 7.2. The US Geological Survey put the quake’s magnitude at 6.8 and said it was at a relatively shallow depth of 11.5 miles.
The village of Tafeghaghte, 40 miles south-west of Marrakech, was almost entirely destroyed, with the quake’s epicentre 30 miles away through the Atlas mountains. AFP journalists reported very few buildings still standing.
“Three of my grandchildren and their mother are dead,” said 72-year-old Omar Benhanna. “They’re still under the debris. It wasn’t so long ago that we were playing together.”
While the country mourned amid the first crucial hours of the rescue effort, some questioned the speed of the emergency response. Morocco’s king has long been quietly accused of governing from his residence in France. Despite him returning to chair the emergency response meeting, others said that vital hours had perhaps been lost due to a need for the palace’s approval and control.
“Ultimately, nothing in the country gets done with the green light from the palace … so much time was lost because [the king] was physically not there,” said Errazzouki, referring to the time when the earthquake struck. “Fundamentally, this is a reflection of how ineffective Moroccan governance has been due to the fact it relies entirely on an authoritarian structure of a figure who is absent.
“There’s a cloud of opacity surrounding communications, and this becomes an impediment to the state being able to effectively carry out emergency operations … every second counts in these moments, every minute it takes to get approval, to double-check all these tedious time consuming steps – people are dying. Lives could have been saved.”
As residents buried their dead on Saturday, the funeral rites for 70 victims were punctuated by cries and screams. In the evening, television channels broadcast aerial images showing entire villages of clay houses in the al-Haouz region completely destroyed.
“I’ve lost everything”, said Lahcen, a resident of the remote mountain village of Moulay Brahim, whose wife and four children were killed.
Rescue workers recovered the bodies of Lahcen’s three daughters from the rubble of what was once their home, while continuing to search for the bodies of his wife and son.
Video from Moulay Brahim showed villages carrying corpses wrapped in blankets through the streets. “We could hear rocks falling and people screaming. We thought it was the apocalypse,” one local resident told AFP.
Bouchra, another Moulay Brahim resident, dried her tears with her scarf as she watched men digging graves to bury the victims.
“My cousin’s grandchildren are dead,” she said in a knotted voice.
“I saw the devastation of the earthquake live and I’m still shaking. It’s like a ball of fire that has swallowed up everything in its path. Everyone here has lost family, whether in our village or elsewhere in the region.”
The Red Cross warned that repairing the damage wrought by the powerful earthquake could take years. Unesco pledged to help repair damage to heritage in historic Marrakech, but the prospect of rebuilding in inaccessible remote towns and villages, already deprived of state infrastructure, appeared even more challenging.
“It won’t be a matter of a week or two … We are counting on a response that will take months, if not years,” said the Red Cross Middle East and north Africa director, Hossam Elsharkawi.
Residents of Marrakech, the major city nearest to the epicentre, said some buildings had collapsed in the old city, a Unesco world heritage site. Video showed the city’s famous 12th-century Koutoubia mosque, which stands over the central Djemaa el-Fna marketplace, quaking with the initial force of the tremors, as people fled into the open area to seek safety. Early reports indicated the mosque had sustained damage, but the extent was not immediately clear.
Philippe Vernant – a specialist in active tectonics, particularly in Morocco, at the University of Montpellier – told Agence France-Presse that even though the quake did not hit in Morocco’s most active seismological region, aftershocks could be expected. “Even if they are less strong, they can lead to the collapse of buildings already weakened by the earthquake. Traditionally, we tend to say that aftershocks diminish in intensity.”
The tremor was also felt in the coastal cities of Rabat, Casablanca, Agadir and Essaouira.
The prime minister of Morocco’s cross-strait neighbour Spain, Pedro Sánchez, expressed his “solidarity and support to the people of Morocco in the wake of this terrible earthquake … Spain is with the victims of this tragedy.”
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was “devastated” and that “France stands ready to help with first aid.”
Algerian state television broadcast a message from the presidency, declaring that the state would open its airspace to allow the transport of humanitarian aid to Morocco as well as offering aid resources, a significant shift after the complete rupture in diplomatic relations between the two nations that has lasted for two years.
This earthquake is the deadliest in Morocco since the 1960 quake that destroyed Agadir and killed 15,000 people, a third of the city’s population at that time.
“It takes a crisis, a disaster like this to shed light on the day to day realities of people who live in the margins,” said Errazzouki.
Agence France-Presse, Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
#Morocco #earthquake #mourning #begins #rescue #continues #death #toll #Earthquakes
