Morocco earthquake: The Atlas Mountains is vulnerable, the issue of building safety is being discussed
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00:00 Well, also covering this story for us today is France24's Shirley Sitbon from our science desk
00:04 and she's with me in the studio right now. Shirley, let's talk about this earthquake zone
00:09 in the Atlas Mountains because it doesn't experience a lot of quakes, does it? But
00:15 it's still pretty vulnerable. Explain to us about why.
00:18 It is unlike Turkey where everyone was alerting and really concerned about a potential new
00:24 earthquake and everybody was talking about it because the country's just crossed with
00:28 various fault lines and is between several tectonic plates. Well, in Morocco, it's not
00:34 the same. There is, of course, in the north, this great fault line between the Eurasian plate and
00:39 the African plate. And of course, Morocco is mainly on the African plate. And that's where
00:44 most of the activity, the seismic activity is happening. But now we're further south
00:49 because there are also local fault lines. And this is where the epicenter was in the Atlas
00:55 Mountains. It's deep in the – not deep in the ground, actually, only 10 to 20, 10 to 15
01:01 kilometres deep. And that's why it was so powerful. But it's very rare. And that is
01:06 one of the reasons for which it's so dramatic because the populations are not used to it
01:11 because there aren't that many tremors in that area.
01:14 And Shirley, in terms of the response, as we were hearing there from our guest,
01:20 international aid is on its way, but local organisations are obviously working extremely
01:24 hard as well. Of course, they are. They're already on the ground. We can see some images.
01:29 I brought images of first the international aid because we saw the Spanish aid workers arriving.
01:35 This is actually from Marrakesh. We're talking here about actually the construction. There was
01:40 a lot of devastation in Marrakesh and elsewhere. And why is that? Well, in Morocco, there are
01:46 many regulations about how to build homes and buildings in a safe way that would,
01:53 you know, survive earthquakes and be maintained and not be destroyed. But unfortunately,
01:57 those rules are not always applied. First of all, there are a lot of old buildings,
02:02 ancient buildings, which are very beautiful, but they have to be reinforced so they're not damaged
02:08 during all those tremors. And also, well, sometimes people build their own homes and
02:14 they all not always know the rules. Now, these images are also from Marrakesh a few years back
02:19 when the old city was restored. And there is some criticism saying, well, they should have also
02:25 strengthened this area so there wouldn't be that much devastation today. It cost a lot of money
02:30 and some of these areas are now seriously damaged. There needs to be maybe a national plan. Some
02:36 experts say that, for example, people build their own homes in these remote villages. And since
02:42 they're building their own homes, they don't always apply the rules, the engineering rules
02:47 for earthquakes. And so they need to be showed how to do this to be helped and homes need to be
02:53 reinforced. So in the future, this does not happen. Of course, this will take a lot of time.
02:57 And also people need to know how to act when there is an actual tremor.
03:01 All right. Really important reporting. Thanks very much indeed for that update.