“This is my home,” says Hahcen, standing on a pile of rubble in the tourist town of Ouirgane, near the epicenter of the earthquake that struck Morocco last Friday.
Hahcen lost his mother in the earthquake. The house where he lived with four other people was reduced to rubble, as were the houses of two other neighbors.
A few meters away, five people from another family gather in a circle in what remains of their house. An older man, a woman and a young girl are crying. “Yesterday they picked up two bodies,” Hahcen reports.
A total of five people died in those three houses. “Everything here has been destroyed,” says the young man.
Operations continued there today to rescue five buried bodies.
There is a lot of movement along the road: excavators clear rubble, military trucks loaded with material stop and various vehicles transport relief supplies to the affected population. Elements of the ‘gendarmerie’ try to organize traffic.
Two mobile health units were installed, with four offices. About twenty people were waiting outside for their turn.
“Here we have all the medical devices, medicines. We treat emergencies, chronic diseases”, Lusa explains to a person in charge of the Moroccan Ministry of Health.
The official added that there are still villages in the mountains that are inaccessible by road and the ministry is therefore sending medical teams in Royal Air Force helicopters.
“You cannot enter the center of the city, it is very dangerous,” a security guard warns, referring to the houses that collapsed and others badly damaged by the shock.
Ouirgane, in the High Atlas (Southern Morocco), at the gates of the Toubkal National Park – the highest mountain in North Africa, at 4,167 meters – and next to a dam, “it used to be a tourist town, but not anymore ”, he regrets Emnouany.
Moments before, the man had left a two-story house through the window: “It was my house and my shop, a small supermarket, was four meters long. Twenty years of work is over.”
The entrance door is now inaccessible and the building’s foundation has been virtually destroyed.
‘I have no money to get the house back’it says.
In this village, about 60 people were killed and “many were injured, they were taken to hospitals in Marrakech”.
The city is one of the worst hit by the earthquake, which was registered at 11:11 pm on Friday (the same time in Lisbon) and caused more than 2,800 deaths and over 2,500 injuries, with a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale, according to the Moroccan Institute. National Geophysical Survey – the United States Geological Survey recorded a magnitude of 6.8.
“My heart is broken,” said Anfat Dihaj, a biologist living in Rabat who returned to her home country to check on her family’s homes and now distributes medicine.
Anfat’s mother ran a hotel there, but “everything is destroyed”, as are her family’s houses.
“A woman who was pregnant had a miscarriage and a mother died, but the one-month-old baby survived,” he says.
Closer to the dam, a patio now accommodates 25 people from three families. Blankets, mattresses, a refrigerator – switched off because there is no electricity -, a sofa, tables, a gas stove and many bags of belongings form the scene.
Here are the houses where they lived. “Everything came inside,” says Ahmid, and they have been sleeping outside since Friday.
“It gets cold at night, so we have a lot of blankets,” he says. It wasn’t until this morning that they got tents, which were tied to the ground, but the wind lifted the base.
“We don’t know how to put them together,” says a young woman, Hajar, 17, who describes having to break down doors to get her family out of the house.
Despite everything, the uncle is happy: “God protected us when we left home.”
When asked if it is difficult to live in these conditions, Hajar laughs and answers: “We are alive, so…”.
Source: DN
