Government rescue workers began to reach some devastated mountain villages in Morocco on Monday, but many more settlements were waiting desperately for help, three days after the country was hit by the strongest earthquake in the area in more than a century.
In the town of Amizmiz at the foot of the High Atlas Mountains in the province of Al Haouz, more ambulances and uniformed emergency personnel were on the streets than on Sunday, and more survivors appeared to be sheltering in disaster relief tents rather than in makeshift structures.
But some roads in the Atlas Mountains near the ancient southern city of Marrakesh remained blocked by landslides caused by Friday’s earthquake, which killed at least 2,681 people and injured more than 2,500, according to the latest figures released by the Interior Ministry on Monday.
Many survivors were without power and phone service, fueling criticism on social media about the government’s response. In some villages where homes are made of mud bricks, as many as half of the houses were flattened. With official aid slow to arrive, many Moroccan citizens have stepped in themselves to fill in the gaps.
In one remote Atlas Mountains village, Douar Tnirt, residents aided by a volunteer group dug through rubble to try and find a 9-year-old girl believed to be buried under her collapsed house. Among those digging was her father, Mohammed Abarada, who had survived the quake with his other daughter, a baby, in his arms.
When a team of Moroccan emergency personnel and Spanish aid workers arrived at the home on Monday, some residents greeted them with anger.
“Ninety-six hours!” one man screamed after an officer told the crowd to keep back. “People came from all over. We buried people. We rescued people.”
Elsewhere in the village, volunteers carried a woman away on a stretcher after she began bleeding heavily. She had lost her husband in the earthquake, and now friends in the village said she might have had a miscarriage.
Others tried to comfort the wounded and grieving. A group of women who had come from the city of Casablanca to help their family in Douar Tnirt threw their arms around their cousins and other women, kissing them on both cheeks and murmuring words of reassurance and sympathy.
“It’s what God commanded,” one said.
A lack of ambulances and other transportation from Douar Tnirt meant that some people who had been pulled alive from the rubble over the weekend died before they could be taken to Marrakesh for treatment, residents said. Others waited for hours before being driven there by private transport.
Some Moroccans expressed frustration with the pace of aid efforts.
“Help was extremely late,” said Fouad Abdelmoumni, a Moroccan economist. “The overwhelming majority of victims have had nothing to eat, and some nothing to drink, for 48 hours or more, including in areas accessible by roads that are still in good condition.”
The Moroccan government has been generally tight-lipped since the quake…
2023-09-11 14:04:12
Article from www.nytimes.com