FES, Morocco—A 24-year-old man in Marrakech’s famous Old Town was asleep at home when the magnitude-6.8 earthquake struck southern Morocco on Friday.
“I felt the bed shaking,” Wiame Gunma told The Daily Beast. “I had a panic attack and started crying. I couldn’t move or do anything.”
But the chilling terror combined with the reality that the house might collapse on top of it. Gunma and her family rushed into the streets to witness the scale of the tragedy unfolding there.
“The neighborhood was full of scared people,” she said. “They were stressed and screaming the whole time.”
The earthquake damaged half of the homes in Gunma Prefecture, leaving many nearby residents completely homeless. She and her relatives were afraid to return to her home amid possible aftershocks and had to camp overnight in a local garden.
Many Moroccans suffered even worse. official death toll The earthquake killed 2,497 people and injured another 2,476. But it will take longer to grasp the true extent of the devastation. Moroccan authorities continue to struggle to reach out to remote towns and villages hardest hit by the quake.
Information trickling in from rural Morocco paints a grim picture. Al Hauz, southeast of Marrakech, accounts for more than half of the recorded deaths, many of them in isolated communities in the Atlas Mountains.
On the other hand, residents of Tizi Ntest, a village in Taroudannt, southwest of Marrakech, video They carry the dead on donkeys themselves, waiting for help from the government and aid agencies.
“At this stage, we are still collecting water, food and cover to go to the village,” the Marrakech branch of the Women’s Rights League, one of the groups organizing the assistance, told the Daily Beast. “Many villages in the countryside have restricted access.
Moroccan leaders are mobilizing a range of resources, including the military, to respond as debris blocks critical roads. As military vehicles zipped along the motorway from Casablanca to Marrakech, the army was called out. excavator, helicopterincluding drones that assist in rescue and evacuation.
Morocco has received offers of additional assistance from various countries, including: Israel, Kuwait, Romania, Taiwan, USA. Even Morocco’s longtime rival Algeria open the airspace On a plane carrying relief supplies to a neighboring country in the midst of the region’s worst earthquake in memory.
in September 9th ReportThe US Geological Survey said the earthquake was the largest to hit southern Morocco since at least 1900, as far back as US government agency records go.
But not the entire kingdom is accustomed to deadly shaking.
An earthquake of magnitude 6.4 In 2004, 628 people were killed, 926 injured and more than 15,000 left homeless in the northern city of Al Hoceima. A Geological Survey report notes that a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in 1960 killed between 12,000 and 15,000 people in the southern port of Agadir, and the episode reflects the city’s reaction to recent events. formed the
Agadir IT expert Safa Akhdid said he and his friends evacuated their apartment when the building shook during Friday’s earthquake.
“I found people running from their homes and screaming,” Akhdid told the Daily Beast. “Everybody was scared.
Aftershocks are a natural concern. The first is determined by the Geological Survey. magnitude 4.2— hit the Marrakech area on 10 September.
The impact on the historic sites of Marrakech, the capital of the medieval North African empire and Morocco’s largest tourist destination, has been highlighted.
damaged by the earthquake Koutoubia Mosquethe most famous place of worship in Marrakech and the flagship of Marrakech. green mosque program, Morocco’s proud project to build a religious facility with solar power. Houses, mosques and other historic buildings in Marrakech’s old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, were similarly damaged or completely destroyed.
But the destruction of underserved settlements beyond Marrakech could have an even greater impact in the future.
Asmae Bargaan, head of a cooperative in Taskukte, a village in the Ouarzazate province southeast of Marrakech, on Friday spoke of the fear spreading throughout the community.
“Do you know what terror, terror, terror is?” she said. “The houses shook and we fled to the streets outside. The old houses were in ruins, they were all in ruins. ”
Bargaan told the Daily Beast that all the homes in Taskukte had either collapsed or had cracks undermining their structural integrity. Villagers refused to return to their remaining homes and instead slept in the fields.
Jamie Fico, an American researcher who was visiting Taskukte when the quake hit, pointed to long-term concerns related to the shattering of rock formations near the village.
“When it rains, a lot of big stones will be brought into the village,” she said.
Mr Balgan outlined the risks for villagers in one province. A history of deadly floods“When winter comes, the whole village will be gone. The mountains will attack the village.”
Fico added that inaccurate predictions about aftershocks continue to be widespread and the lack of information is fueling a climate of fear.
“There’s a lot of misinformation going around,” she told The Daily Beast. “I got a call warning me that it would recur at a certain time in another city.”
But social media is also a lifeline as we struggle to reach those who need it most.
Moroccans across the kingdom and diaspora have shared blood donation ads, calls for donations and plans to organize caravans to the hardest-hit areas. in an instagram post Achraf Hakimi, the face of Morocco’s victory at the 2022 FIFA World Cup, received more than one million likes and called on Moroccans to donate blood.
On September 10, Moroccan officials announced that this type of campaign encouraged Moroccans to donate. 6,000 bags of blood in a day.
As aid snakes its way from Morocco’s cities to the kingdom’s devastated countryside, despair in the affected areas grows.
“I see a lot of people camping along roads and in open spaces away from buildings,” says Fico. “People aren’t leaving, but they have nowhere to go.”