Rescue workers search for survivors among the rubble with pickaxes and, if necessary, their bare hands. Every now and then they are lucky and can free someone, but in the meantime more than 2,000 deaths have already been counted and the first victims are being buried. The mountain villages have been particularly hard hit.
The Flemish Nathalie Lepang lives at the foot of the Atlas Mountains and calls the piles of rubble in the small mountain village of Asni “grisly”. “It is not a large village, it is actually just a small village and 26 deaths have been counted there so far,” says Nathalie.
She looks in amazement at the devastation the earthquake has caused to a friend’s house. “It was a very beautiful house and there is not much left of it,” she shows in self-made images. “The whole house is broken, everything here is broken.” These scenes “make all the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s just awful.”
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