Moroccan rescuers, supported by foreign teams, redoubled their efforts on Monday to find possible survivors and provide assistance to hundreds of homeless people, almost 72 hours after the earthquake which left nearly 2,900 dead according to a new assessment.
The earthquake, the deadliest in the kingdom for more than sixty years, devastated entire villages on Friday evening in a region located southwest of the tourist city of Marrakech (center), leaving 2,862 dead and 2,562 injured, according to a recent report. official report published Monday.
The epicenter of the earthquake is located in a mountainous area of ??the High Atlas, where the landslides have further made access to the affected villages difficult, such as those in the commune of Ighil.
To deliver food to survivors of the earthquake in the small isolated towns of this town, helicopters make round trips, AFP journalists noted.
A narrow mountainous road in this town was clogged on Monday with cars transporting aid and several ambulances, but the villages closest to the epicenter of the earthquake still remain inaccessible due to landslides.
“I walked 15 kilometers from my village where there was a lot of damage to look for food. Our children have nothing left to eat,” Lahcen Aït Malik told AFP.
Morocco accepted offers from four countries to send search and rescue teams: Spain, Britain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
According to AFP correspondents, Spanish rescuers were present in two localities hit by the earthquake south of Marrakech, Talat Nyaqoub and Amizmiz.
In Talat Nyaqoub, twelve ambulances and several dozen 4x4s from the army and the gendarmerie were deployed.
Not far away, a team of 30 Spanish firefighters, a doctor, a nurse and two technicians are coordinating with Moroccan authorities to begin excavations.
“The big difficulty lies in remote and difficult to access areas like here, but the injured are airlifted,” the head of the Spanish team, Annika Coll, told AFP.
“It’s difficult to say if the chances of finding survivors are diminishing because for example in Turkey (hit by a very violent earthquake in February), we managed to find a woman alive after six and a half days. There always has hope,” she added. “It is also important to find the dead bodies because the families must know and grieve.”
70 km further north, another team of 48 men from the Spanish Military Emergency Unit (UME) has established a camp at the entrance to the small town of Amizmiz since Sunday evening.
In the village, two large Moroccan army trucks distributed hundreds of blankets to residents who lost their homes, noted an AFP journalist.
“My mother is dead, her house destroyed. My accommodation in Amizmiz is no longer safe so we sleep outside in tents with my two children aged 4 months and 6 years,” laments Hafid Ait Lahcen, 32.
“No one from the authorities has offered us rehousing. We are completely lost,” laments this construction worker.
In several localities, members of the security forces continue to help dig graves for the victims, while others set up yellow tents for the victims.
In the isolated village of Imi n’Talat, southwest of Marrakech, volunteers worked hard on Sunday evening to extract bodies buried under the rubble, according to an AFP correspondent.
“I came to help because no one is there for them. We have already taken out six bodies,” Yassine Ait Addi, who came from a neighboring village, told AFP.
The earthquake reached magnitude 7 according to the Moroccan Center for Scientific and Technical Research (6.8 according to the American Seismological Service), and is the most powerful to have ever been measured in Morocco.
It is the deadliest in Morocco since the one that destroyed Agadir, on the west coast of the country, on February 29, 1960: between 12,000 and 15,000 people, or a third of the city’s population, died there.
The head of the Moroccan government, Aziz Akhannouch, chaired a meeting on Monday devoted in particular to the reconstruction of destroyed housing in the disaster areas.
“Citizens who lost their homes will receive compensation (?) a clear offer will be announced soon,” he said.
According to him, solutions are currently being studied for homeless people.
12/09/2023 01:39:34 – Talat Nyaqoub (Maroc) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
