Aid slow to arrive to quake-hit Moroccan villages
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Transcript
00:00 Now the rescue effort continues over in Morocco after this past weekend's powerful earthquake.
00:05 The death toll currently stands at 2,900.
00:08 Hundreds of thousands of people in the country have been left homeless, including those in
00:12 mountain villages that were among the hardest hit.
00:16 We can now go across to France 24's Luke Schrago standing by in Marrakech for us.
00:20 Luke, good afternoon.
00:21 You visited villages in the Atlas Mountains.
00:23 Tell us what you saw.
00:25 Well, on Tuesday we went over to Tolkien village in the Atlas Mountains.
00:33 It's about 60 kilometers to the southwest of Marrakech where we are now.
00:37 So relatively close to the epicenter.
00:39 It's a village of about 1,000 people and during the earthquake they saw three dead.
00:44 Now we have to say we noticed that not a single building had been left untouched.
00:48 But we did notice a difference in terms of how those buildings were affected.
00:53 Those that had been built with modern construction and those, quite a lot of them built with
00:58 this traditional mud brick.
01:00 Those buildings had fallen apart with walls and roofs caving in on their occupants.
01:05 One father spoke to us of how he dug out his family, including a one and a half year old
01:10 toddler with his bare hands.
01:12 Now the mood really throughout the entire village is one of confusion.
01:17 Where has the help from the state been?
01:19 All of the aid that has been coming in there has been from local volunteers.
01:22 We spoke to one man who'd been living in Agadir.
01:24 He is from the village of Tolkien and he'd driven in a van with blankets and tents, whatever
01:30 he could bring in.
01:31 And that is the kind of aid that these villages are seeing.
01:34 People sleeping outside in makeshift tents, a lot of them made with just tarpaulins and
01:39 sheeting.
01:42 Some more tents from the Morocco Civil Protection Service.
01:45 Again, those being brought in by local volunteers, bringing them up from supplies lower down.
01:50 And at this point we have to mention that the small town of Amisniz is just 10 kilometres
01:55 away.
01:56 Now that's one of the camps where an international contingent of rescuers is based.
02:02 But all of the aid so far that's been coming in is on a drip feed from locals.
02:07 All of these villages, over a thousand of them across the quake zone in the mountains
02:11 have been badly affected.
02:13 They're all in the same boat really.
02:15 They're badly isolated.
02:16 In some cases still cut off with roads that have been severed during the earthquake.
02:21 So it's going to be an enormous job to restore that kind of connection.
02:24 Now Morocco's government has said that it will rebuild.
02:28 It has made that promise.
02:29 But as residents in the Atlas Mountains, they want to know when that's going to be since
02:34 there's been little indication of it so far.
02:37 And that winter is around the corner.
02:39 Luke, let's just talk about the 72-hour window, because we've passed that 72-hour window since
02:45 the earthquake struck.
02:47 Given that, are search and rescue operations still underway?
02:54 These operations are still underway to try and get search and rescuers in.
02:58 We've got four nations that have come into Morocco, the UK, Spain, Qatar and the United
03:02 Arab Emirates.
03:03 Now, two of those contingents are based in the town of Amismiz that we met yesterday.
03:09 They're working out of there with UN coordinators, with teams of dogs and with sound detectors
03:14 to try and find people under the ruins.
03:16 But as time moves on, it is less and less likely that survivors are going to be found,
03:20 particularly with this traditional mud brick style of construction, with one rescuer saying
03:25 it didn't leave enough of a survivable void.
03:28 That means the air pockets where people would be able to survive.
03:31 Now, one rescuer told us that there was always hope.
03:34 They're definitely not going to be giving up and they're continuing to work.
03:37 But there have been indications that the organization of the situation has not really been really
03:43 been enough.
03:45 One team we spoke to said that they'd spent eight hours on the road on Tuesday in total,
03:50 four hours to get somewhere where they were told that they'd need to be rescuing people.
03:54 They got there and they found out there was no one there to rescue and they had to drive
03:57 four hours all the way back.
03:59 Now, again, in the three days from Sunday to Tuesday, one rescuer told us that not a
04:03 single team had found anyone to rescue, that they hadn't found any survivors at all and
04:10 that it was highly likely that anyone who did survive was pulled out from under the
04:14 ruins within the first 20 minutes after the earthquake.
04:17 It seems that it's been too long to set up this coordination.
04:21 Teams were only starting to have coordination meetings between different international contingents
04:26 on Tuesday night.
04:27 So we may have to ask the question as to whether the Moroccans were quick enough to get things
04:32 moving and to get things set up.
04:34 And if the scale of setting up this operation has been too much for them to handle.
04:39 And of course, we've asked the question in the recent days, why haven't other countries
04:43 been coming in?
04:44 Why haven't why hasn't Morocco accepted offers that have been coming from around the world?
04:47 But it may in fact may not have made a difference.
04:50 Certainly, there are sure to be exceptions.
04:52 There may well still be survivors there.
04:54 And again, these teams are still continuing to work all day through up at six in the morning,
05:00 working right the way through until long after nightfall.
05:03 But it seems that we may well at this point be moving into a period of body recovery rather
05:07 than rescue, not to mention the need to bring to bring in concrete aid to the people who
05:12 need to rebuild their homes and their lives.