Earthquake in Morocco | Race against time to find survivors

(Marrakech) Volunteers and rescuers remain mobilized on Tuesday in Morocco to try to find possible survivors, even if hopes are dwindling more than 72 hours after the earthquake which left nearly 2,900 dead.

The epicenter of the earthquake which left 2,862 dead and 2,562 injured, according to a final report Monday evening, is located in a mountainous area of ​​the High Atlas, where landslides have further made access to the affected villages difficult.

Moroccan rescuers, supported by foreign teams, are trying to speed up searches to find possible survivors and provide shelter to hundreds of families who have lost their homes.

But in certain isolated areas, residents say they are abandoned to their fate.

In the village of Imoulas, perched in the High Atlas, the inhabitants seem lost amid the rubble of their houses.

“We feel completely abandoned here, no one has come to help us. Our houses have collapsed and we have nowhere to go. Where are all these poor people going to live? “, laments Khadija, a resident of this difficult-to-access village, hiding her face with her veil.

“The state didn’t come, we didn’t see anyone. After the earthquake, they came to count the number of victims. Since then, not a single one of them remains. No civil protection, no assistance force. No one is there with us,” says Mouhamed Aitlkyd in the middle of the rubble.

To deliver food to earthquake survivors in certain small landlocked towns, helicopters are making round trips, AFP journalists noted.

Solutions under study

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.

In the meantime, the villages closest to the epicenter of the earthquake still remain inaccessible due to landslides.

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.

More than 300 patients have already been admitted there, said doctor Colonel Youssef Qamouss.

“We assess the severity, so serious patients we send them to Marrakech. We also have a radiology unit, a laboratory and a pharmacy,” he said.

On Sunday evening, Morocco announced that it had accepted offers from four countries to send search and rescue teams: Spain, the United Kingdom, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

According to AFP correspondents, Spanish rescuers were present on Monday in two towns hit by the earthquake south of Marrakech, Talat Nyaqoub and Amizmiz.

“The big difficulty is in remote and difficult to access areas like here, but the injured are airlifted,” said the head of the Spanish team, Annika Coll.

“It’s difficult to say whether the chances of finding survivors are diminishing, because for example in Turkey [frappée par un très violent séisme en février], we managed to find a live woman after six and a half days. There is always hope,” she added. “It is also important to find the dead bodies, because the families must know and grieve.”

The earthquake reached magnitude 7 according to the Moroccan Center for Scientific and Technical Research (6.8 according to the American Seismological Service). It is the most powerful to have ever been measured in Morocco.

The earthquake is the deadliest in the kingdom 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.