Hopes of finding survivors dissipated on Tuesday in Morocco four days after a devastating earthquake in the Marrakech region, where King Mohammed VI visited the injured.
The earthquake, which struck a region southwest of the tourist city of Marrakech (center) on Friday evening, left 2,901 dead and 5,530 injured, according to a latest official report.
The Red Cross has launched an appeal for funds of around 100 million euros to support relief operations, after releasing one million Swiss francs from its Emergency Fund to support the activities of the Moroccan Red Crescent in field.
King Mohammed VI visited the Marrakech university hospital on Tuesday, before donating blood, the official MAP agency said.
He “visited the intensive care unit and the earthquake victims’ hospitalization unit” to find out about the state of health of the injured as well as the care provided to them, the agency added.
Moroccan volunteers and rescuers, supported by foreign teams, are trying to speed up searches to find possible survivors and provide shelter to hundreds of families who lost their homes in the earthquake which destroyed entire villages.
But in some isolated areas, residents say they are left to their own devices.
In the village of Douzrou, located 80 km southwest of Marrakech and blown away by the earthquake, worry can be seen on the faces of survivors, who have improvised makeshift shelters.
Around a hundred people died in this town located at the start of the High Atlas mountain ranges, according to residents.
“It is important that we are taken care of, we cannot survive for long in the wild. The climatic conditions are very harsh. We fear the worst with the winter coming,” worries Ismaïl Oubella, 36, who lost three children (3, 6 and 8 years old), his pregnant wife and his mother.
“We want to be rehoused as quickly as possible, we lost everything, even our livestock. We took the dead out ourselves” from the rubble, alarms Hossine Benhammou, 61. Nine members of his family including his daughter and two granddaughters died.
A team of 20 rescuers from the United Kingdom International Search and Rescue Team (UK-ISAR) arrived on scene.
“The residents managed the situation but we are going to deploy dogs” to see if there are people under the rubble, team leader Steve Willitt told AFP.
“We are afraid of the rains which risk cutting off the unpaved road leading to our village. We risk dying of hunger,” says resident Lahcen Ouhmane, 68.
In the town of Amizmiz, about an hour away, dozens of survivors are crowded around a semi-trailer, waiting for food aid distributed by volunteers.
“It’s not the government that helps, it’s the people,” says Abdelilah Tiba, 28, a volunteer.
“What are we going to do when people stop helping us?” worries Fatima Benhamoud, 39 years old.
According to Unicef, around 100,000 children were affected by the earthquake in Morocco, where they represent almost a third of the population. The UN organization said it had “mobilized humanitarian personnel to support the immediate response on the ground”.
The head of the Moroccan government, Aziz Akhannouch, assured Monday that “citizens who have lost their housing will receive compensation.”
According to him, solutions are currently being studied for the homeless.
The villages closest to the epicenter of the earthquake still remain inaccessible due to landslides.
In some landlocked areas, helicopters go back and forth to transport food, according to AFP journalists.
The Moroccan army has set up field hospitals to treat the wounded in landlocked areas, such as in the village of Asni, in the disaster-stricken province of Al-Haouz, just over an hour from Marrakech.
The earthquake reached magnitude 7 according to the Moroccan Center for Scientific and Technical Research (6.8 according to the American Institute of Geophysics, USGS). It is the most powerful to have ever been measured in Morocco.
The earthquake is also the deadliest in the kingdom since the one that destroyed Agadir, on the west coast, on February 29, 1960: 12,000 to 15,000 people, or a third of the city’s population, died.
12/09/2023 20:02:28 – Douzrou (Morocco) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP