Devastating quake in Morocco

The 6.8 Richter scale earthquake in Marrakesh, especially the old city including the UNESCO-marked heritage buildings, on Friday night, at around 11.11 pm local time, has turned out to be devastating with over 1,000 people dead so far and over 1,200 injured, and thousands of panic-stricken people spent the night in the open in fear that another quake could strike.

The last time there was a quake in Morocco was in 2004. The experts say that the epicentre of the Friday quake was in the North Atlas mountains, 70km south of Marrakesh. The Moroccan quake monitoring centre has recorded a 7-point Richter scale quake. There has been a swift international response to the tragedy from the United Arab Emirates to Turkey and India, from Spain, France and Britain.

Earthquakes are unpredictable, say seismologists. When the earth in any part shakes, it is sudden and out of the blue though the subterranean murmurs and turbulence is always present. All that can be done is to get the emergency responses into place as quickly as possible. The residents of the villages in the region, and on the outskirts of Marakkesh, are still distraught. They say that people are under the rubble of collapsed buildings, and the local rescue teams are doing what they could with the equipment at hand to pull people out. The officials feel that the death toll could go up and so too that of the injured.

Most regions in the vulnerable seismic zones are rarely prepared for a quake as they should be because their location in quake-prone areas makes them vulnerable. In places like San Francisco and Los Angeles on the western coast of the United States and which is supposed to lie across the San Andreas fault-line, measures have been taken to minimise the damage caused by a quake though the quake itself cannot be prevented.

This is also true of densely-populated cities like Tokyo in Japan with the quake-resilient skyscrapers. The quake that hit south-east Turkey and north-west Syria showed that the buildings were not such that could endure a quake. And they were also densely-populated, which makes them so much more vulnerable. It is indeed very difficult to prepare for a quake except that housing structures and urban spaces could be better planned keeping in mind the quake that could hit the place. As could be seen in the earthquake that hit south-west Turkey and north-east Syria sometime back again caused large loss of lives because of the dense residential districts.

There is a move of late of creating natural disaster resilience systems and mechanisms and it is yet to pick up momentum across countries and continents. It will have to do with the economic status of the country. The stronger the economy the better would the natural disaster resilience infrastructure.

And it can be seen that it is the areas where people live the most where the damage is the most and more people die. In the cities, it is the quarters that the poor inhabit that get affected most when a quake hits. And it is also the far-off villages that the poor inhabit that remain vulnerable to quakes as has happened in Morocco now. It becomes necessary to keep in mind the vulnerable sections while preparing for natural disasters.

Though many countries have offered aid to Morocco, it cannot be sent unless the Moroccan government makes a formal request. Morocco has not officially sought international aid so far. And the areas affected by the quake are some of the remote parts, and Moroccans are rushing medical and other aid to these places, reaching to the affected could take time. These are exigencies in a crisis that cannot be anticipated.