Imi N'tala will never be again. At the entrance to the village and from the road, a narrow tongue that borders the mountain, you can see enormous destruction that is misleading. It seems like everything and it's just a preview. You have to continue on foot between fallen buildings, destroyed refrigerators, crushed sofas and broken light poles to reach a nook in the path that turns to the right and shows the real monster: crossed in the street, a stone wall weighing several tons crushes dozens of houses. To the right, the mountain still shows the murderous notch with hundreds of meters of whitish rock. They are the pieces of mountain that fell on the village and erased it forever. On Friday night, the village of Imi N'tala, 70 kilometers south of Marrakech, disappeared under an avalanche of stones. If you cross the town and continue along a road dotted with rocks like cars and cracks three fingers wide in the asphalt, you get a perspective of the destruction. From afar, Imi N'tala is the definition of devastation, ground zero of the most powerful earthquake in the history of Morocco.
In this village alone, which no longer exists, at least 84 of its 373 residents died and barely half a dozen buildings remain standing. It's a saying. The houses that hold up, some with two floors, have cracks that run through the structure from top to bottom. That's why Samira Ait Ougadir, because she knows that her home will no longer exist, wants to leave. “They have to evacuate us. Last night alone we noticed four tremors. At any moment the mountain can fall and take everything with it. It's dangerous to be here. We just want them to give us shelter so we can leave. “We want to feel at peace again.” Samira, who covers her head with a brown veil and wears a djellaba of white and blue flowers, says that the mountain killed eight of her relatives and continues to search for the body of her aunt under her rubble.
If I had said that, instead of the mountain, the killer was the earthquake, that wouldn't be entirely true either. The Moroccan Government's neglect of the Atlas region, a marginalized Berber area for decades, has been reflected as a death trap when the earth has roared. With no investment in infrastructure or decent hospitals nearby, access to most villages is now difficult or impossible and ambulances must travel obscene distances to evacuate the injured. Yesterday King Mohamed VI, who has one of the largest fortunes in the world, was finally seen outside an office since the earthquake surprised him on vacation in Paris. Accompanied by his entourage, the monarch visited a hospital in Marrakech early in the afternoon and spoke with some of the wounded admitted after the earthquake, which has already left 2,900 dead and 5,500 injured.
The slow reaction of the authorities felt like a second avalanche in Imi N'tala. Until yesterday, a deployment of rescue teams worthy of the disaster was not seen. Dozens of Qatari firefighters, Moroccan soldiers and volunteers began work yesterday to recover the bodies. Equipped with clubs and chainsaws, they worked to remove the stones to find the dead. Nobody wants to confess it, but nobody is looking for life.
At noon a group of Mallorcan firefighters appears with several trained tracking dogs. The dogs go up and down the mountains of rubble in a daze, desperately sniffing here and there. One of them sneaks into a broken house overlooking the valley and barks. He barks desperately. He barks so much that for a moment it seems that he has found a thread of life. It is not like this. It is the corpse of an elderly woman, who was crushed while she was in the kitchen. While the firefighters remove the stones to recover her body, the daughter of the deceased woman shouts at the journalists to stop recording, that she is her mother and she does not want them to take photos of her like that. Some lower their cameras; others don't. Two television journalists look at the woman, say no problem and set up the tripod, take out the microphone and position the shot to get a perfect shot.
The old man Brahim was saved because he was thirsty: on Friday night, minutes before the earthquake, he went down to a stream at the foot of the village lined with fig, apple and plum trees to look for some water. As soon as he arrived, he noticed the world move at his feet and a gigantic roar. When he turned around, he wanted to die: he had survived, but his people had disappeared. Brahim ran towards home: his wife, his mother, his son and his brother's son died crushed by the stones. His house no longer exists and, even if heavy machinery arrived up there, it would take months to remove the hecatomb of stones, mountains, lives and houses. Despite the pain, Brahim knew how to react. He has two plasters across his forehead from a blow he received while rescuing seven neighbors. When pointed out to the dozen firefighters walking from one side to the other side of the broken town, Brahim shrugs his shoulders. "It's too late. When the avalanche occurred we had no telephone or electricity because everything was destroyed, we were left totally alone.” Brahim, who gets emotional and has to stop talking a couple of times, repeats a complaint that is already a clamor in the Atlas. “Now there are only dead people left. It is important to rescue the bodies to bury them, but if someone had come to help us sooner, lives would have been saved.”
Remembering the misfortune proves almost an exorcism of grief for Brahim. Can not be more. When he finishes, he sits on some black irons, next to a blue sofa, and cries uncontrollably.
Next to him, lying on the floor, is a round wall clock with a gold rim. It is broken and the handles read 3:11. The time the earthquake erased Imi N'tala forever.
