The city of marrakesh woke up this Saturday in “shock” after the earthquake experienced last night, which shook its medina and forced its inhabitants to sleep almost with what they were wearing in the streets and squares, listening to non-stop ambulances around them.
At dawn, seven hours after the magnitude 7 earthquake that shook the region and left hundreds dead in several towns in Morocco, The first image that Marrakech offers is dozens of people wrapped in blankets sleeping on sidewalks, squares and parks, surrounded by packages and suitcases.
Eleven minutes after eleven at night, an earthquake that had not been experienced in decades and that lasted, say the neighbors, between three and four minutes, with shocks that looked like “bombs”, paralyzed this constantly boiling city.
The medina (old area), with an abundance of adobe buildings, took the brunt. A walk through its narrow streets reveals dozens of damaged houses, some half-destroyed. Many are warehouses selling products for tourists, which this Saturday appeared lying and broken on the floor when the blinds were raised.
Early in the morning, some neighbors were already trying to collect some rubble. As Abdullah Mansari, who on a street turned into mountains of rubble helps an old man put them into a car. He still hasn’t dared to enter his house, he confesses.
“I was working in the market when we felt the earthquake. I am 36 years old and this is the first time I have experienced this. We became afraid and went to the square to take refuge. “I slept there.” Abdullah refers to the close and mythical Jemaa el Fna squarewhere hundreds of people gathered to sleep under the open sky for fear of aftershocks.
In addition to Abdullah, there were tourists like Pablo Segarra21 years old, and his four friendsall from Elche, who have slept on the cement of the square with two other Spaniards they have met in Marrakech: Gorka Pagani and his father, from Bilbao.
Along with his backpacks, water bottles, slippers and some blankets, Pablo says that the earthquake surprised the six of them having tea on the roof of their hostel.
“Suddenly everything started to shake and smoke started coming out of the center of the riad (hotel), so we had to run down. Then we saw a very harsh scene, with many half-collapsed buildings and people on the ground who we didn’t know what state they were in.“, Pablo tells EFE.
Gorka affirms that it happened “from one moment to the next” and that they went down to the street “in shock.” “I didn’t know if I was in a movie, there were people on the ground“, he confesses sleepily with his father a few meters away from him.
Margarita Pacheco lived it like “a bomb”. “A roar began to sound and I said to myself: ‘It’s an attack,’ he says to EFE She is Spanish. “It lasted about four or five minutes, I have never seen a house like it in my life, we dropped the television, the vases, the mirrors.”
Brahim, who lives in the medina and has several buildings in the old town, instead expected more than a 7-degree tremor. “He’s a lot,” he says before entering a craft center he owns.
And the last major earthquake remembered in the Maghreb country occurred in 2004 in Al Hoceima, in the northern Rif region. It was 6.3 degrees and 628 people died.
In Marrakech there are much fewer, but Mohamed, who keeps the cars in an open-air parking lot near the large square, will never forget the night when, he notes, “ambulances didn’t stop passing by.”
(With information from EFE)
Source-www.infobae.com