Three years ago tonight, at 23:11 local time on 8 September 2023, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck Al Haouz Province in Morocco. The epicentre lay in the High Atlas, roughly 70 kilometres southwest of Marrakesh, near the town of Ighil. At least 2,960 people were killed. Most of them died outside the city, in mountain villages.
Two things made it as severe as it was. The rupture was shallow, on an oblique-thrust fault beneath the range, so the energy had very little rock to travel through before it reached the surface. And the houses above it were built of stone and rammed earth on steep ground, homes that had stood a long time and were never designed for that kind of shaking. The tremor was felt in Spain, Portugal and Algeria. In Marrakesh, historic buildings that had stood for centuries came down.
The roads into the high valleys are narrow and switchbacked, and many were blocked within minutes by rockfall. Doctors, drivers, soldiers and neighbours carried what they could and walked the last stretches in. Some villages were reached on foot before any vehicle arrived. I think of them tonight, and of the families who waited.
The Wikipedia article is linked below.
Among the buildings damaged was the Tinmel Mosque in the High Atlas, built in the twelfth century, a plain brick and stone prayer hall that had stood through a great deal. The masons rebuilding there and in the villages work in rammed earth and stone, mixing, tamping, waiting for each layer to dry. It is slow, and it cannot be hurried.
In those villages the burials came fast, as custom asks, often within the day, with neighbours washing and wrapping the dead by lamplight while others were still digging. Many of the people who worked through that night were burying their own.