Now she sat alternately on a pile of rocks and a cushion someone had found somewhere, surrounded by the wreckage of her home: chunks of concrete, bamboo rods used for roofing splayed everywhere, a twisted refrigerator, a satellite dish plopped on top of it all. She screamed for help, her mouth filling with dust, until men pulled her out.

The only thing that kept her from dying, too, was her mattress, which the force of the collapsing house folded on top of her as it came down. Then the ceiling fell on her “like an elevator,” she said. Id al-Houcine had just gotten into bed and was about to put on the late-night radio program she started listening to earlier this year to keep herself company after her husband died, one in which Moroccans discussed their problems and their life stories. Then there are those she knew must have died, even if she had not yet seen their bodies: A 5-year-old and the two children of her husband’s brother.

Id al-Houcine knows she lost in the earthquake is unbearably long: her late husband’s son, the son’s wife and three of their children, including a baby, all of whom had lived with her. “We heard screams until we stopped hearing anything.” “That night, everyone was screaming,” said Zahra Id al-Houcine, who was watching a few of her male neighbors sifting through the debris of her collapsed house in search of her relatives on Sunday afternoon. The villagers were on their own, stuck at the end of winding, narrow mountain passes, at the mercy of the monumental landscape where they lived. Ambulances were a rare sight, with most injured people who had been pulled from the wreckage driven to Marrakesh hospitals by private car or motorcycle, if they made it at all.īy Sunday, the government had sent neither emergency responders nor aid to Douar Tnirt and several other mountain villages visited by journalists for The New York Times. On Sunday, it was clear that villages across the Atlas Mountains - even ones just an hour or two from Marrakesh, a major city - were getting little or no official help. Moroccan law criminalizes criticism of the king, which may help explain Moroccans’ muted response. Not that the country has a high tolerance for public outrage. Memories are still fresh of a 2004 earthquake that was one of the most devastating in recent years: Then the prime minister did not visit the hardest-hit areas immediately because protocol dictated that he not appear before the king did. Some Moroccans greeted the government’s anemic response to the disaster with resignation. But Marrakesh and its walled Old City, a UNESCO World Heritage site, appeared to have been spared heavy damage. Seventeen people died in the Marrakesh area, Morocco’s Interior Ministry said Sunday. More than 300,000 civilians in Marrakesh and its outskirts were also affected by the quake, according to a report from the World Health Organization. The quake reduced half the homes in Azgour to rubble and left the remaining ones uninhabitable.ĭestroyed buildings in the village of Amizmiz on Sunday. In villages like Azgour, which lies between two ridges of the Atlas Mountains south of Marrakesh, homes are commonly built of mud bricks, a traditional construction method that leaves them highly vulnerable to earthquakes and heavy rains. Others concerned about aftershocks slept out in the open. “We need to make sure we don’t have a disaster within a disaster,” she said in a statement.Īs night fell on Sunday, families whose houses had been destroyed or were unsafe prepared to sleep behind makeshift shelters of colorful fabric and plastic tarps held down by rocks or in yellow tents provided by firefighters. Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Timesīut she also stressed the need to provide people with clean water and to identify damaged buildings that still pose a danger. “We didn’t wait for anybody to start saving people’s lives,” the village’s imam said.

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