Hopes of finding survivors dissipated Tuesday in Morocco, four days after a devastating earthquake that hit the Marrakech region, where King Mohammed VI visited the injured.
The earthquake, which struck a region located southwest of the tourist city of Marrakech (center) on Friday evening, left 2,901 dead and 5,530 injured, according to the latest official report.
The Red Cross has launched an appeal for funds of around 100 million euros to support relief operations, after having released 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 hospitalization unit for earthquake victims” 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 Douzrou, a village 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 that is coming,” says with concern Ismaïl Oubella, 36, who lost three children (3, 6 and 8 years old), his pregnant wife, as well as his mother.
“Fear of the rains”
“We want to be rehoused as quickly as possible, we lost everything, even our livestock. The dead, we pulled them out ourselves” from the rubble, proclaims Hossine Benhammou, 61 years old. Nine members of his family, including his daughter and two granddaughters, died.
A team of 20 rescuers from the UK’s International Search and Rescue Team arrived on scene.
“The residents managed the situation, but we are going to deploy dogs” to see if there are people under the rubble, Steve Willitt, the team leader, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We are afraid of the rains, which risk cutting off the unpaved road leading to our village. We risk dying of hunger,” confides a resident, Lahcen Ouhmane, 68 years old.
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?” » asks Fatima Benhamoud, 39 years old.
According to the UNICEF agency, around 100,000 children were affected by the earthquake in Morocco, where this age group represents almost a third of the population. The UN organization said it had “mobilized humanitarian personnel to support the immediate response on the ground”.
Field hospitals
The head of the Moroccan government, Aziz Akhannouch, assured Monday that “citizens who 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, located in the disaster-stricken province of al-Haouz, just over an hour from Marrakech.
The earthquake reached a magnitude of 7, according to the Moroccan Center for Scientific and Technical Research (6.8 according to the American Institute of Geophysics). It is the most powerful ever measured in Morocco.
It is also the deadliest to occur in the kingdom since that which 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.