September 9th 2023.
On Friday night, a powerful and rare earthquake struck Morocco, leaving 632 people dead and 320 injured. Residents of Marrakech, the nearest big city to the epicentre, reported some buildings had collapsed in the old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Moroccan TV showed images of a fallen mosque minaret with rubble lying on smashed cars.
Anxious families stood in streets or huddled on the pavement, some carrying children, blankets or other belongings fearing aftershocks. Emergency workers looked for survivors in the rubble of buildings, their reflective yellow vests illuminating the night-time landscape. The quake ripped a gaping hole in one home, and a car was nearly buried by the chunks of a collapsed building.
Montasir Itri, a resident of the mountain village of Asni near the epicentre, said most houses there were damaged. Hamid Afkar, a teacher near Taroudant, said he had fled his home and felt aftershocks. He described the earth shaking for about 20 seconds and doors opening and shutting by themselves.
Morocco’s geophysical centre said the quake struck in the Ighil area of the High Atlas with a magnitude of 7.2, while the US Geological Survey put the magnitude at 6.8 and said it was at a relatively shallow depth of 11.5 miles. Ighil, a mountainous area with small farming villages, is about 40 miles southwest of Marrakech and the quake struck just after 11pm local time.
Other images shared online showed people running and screaming near the 12th century Koutoubia Mosque in Marrakech, one of the city’s most famed landmarks. Moroccan media reported that the mosque suffered damage, but the extent was not immediately clear. Its 226-foot minaret is known as the ‘roof of Marrakech’.
The head of a town near the earthquake’s epicentre told Moroccan news site 2M that several homes in nearby towns had partly or totally collapsed, and electricity and roads were cut off in some places. Lahcen Mhanni, Head of the Seismic Monitoring and Warning Department at the National Institute of Geophysics, said the earthquake was the strongest ever recorded in the mountain region.
Local media reported that roads leading to the mountain region around the epicentre were jammed with vehicles and blocked with collapsed rocks, slowing rescue efforts. The earthquake is Morocco’s deadliest since a 2004 tremor near Al Hoceima in the northern Rif mountains killed over 600 people. It was felt as far away as Portugal and Algeria, according to the Portuguese Institute for Sea and Atmosphere and Algeria’s Civil Defense agency.
In 1960, a magnitude 5.8 tremor struck near the Moroccan city of Agadir and caused thousands of deaths. This prompted changes in construction rules in Morocco, but many buildings, especially rural homes, are not built to withstand such tremors. Friday's quake is a tragic reminder of this, and the devastating effects earthquakes can have on a region.
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