The death toll of victims in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that rocked Marrakech, Morocco, is near 3000, according to Reuters.
The death toll keeps increasing because many of the traditional mud brick houses that are common in mountain villages crumbled to earthen rubble without leaving air pockets.
Some survivors have camped out in the open along the Tizi n’Test road, which connects remote valleys to Marrakesh. They salvaged what they could from the wreckage, quickly packed bundles of their belongings and fled their destroyed villages.
“The authorities are focusing on the bigger communities and not the remote villages that are worst affected,” Hamid Ait Bouyali, 40, said as he waited on the roadside. “There are some villages that still have the dead buried under the rubble.”
Many villagers have had no power or telephone service since the earthquake struck and said they had to rescue loved ones and pull out bodies buried under their crushed homes without any help.
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Abdel Aouragh, a driver, told Al Jazeera he fears the earthquake will change life in the mountain villages even more than it has in the past years.
In the past, he said, people would work either in farming or guiding tourists on picturesque treks through the mountains.
But recently, social media, modernity and social mobility have emptied the villages to the point where only elderly people and children are left in the winter.
Now, he argues, more people will move to Marrakesh, forsaking the villages, and new building regulations will change the traditional way of life.
His fellow driver, Lhassen, added: “This will be the end of the collective. Now, everything will be individual. Pumps, electricity, it will all be individual. In the morning, boys and girls go together to get water. That will now end. The social and collective aspect of the village will now end.”
