On Friday, September 8, at 11:11 p.m. local time, in the many villages dotting the High Atlas mountains of Morocco, thousands were turning in for the night, or were already fast asleep. Fifty miles away, hundreds of thousands in the bustling city of Marrakech were doing the same.
Seismologist Richard Walker from the University of Oxford says multiple factors made Morocco’s Friday evening quake so deadly.
“It is an earthquake occurring in an area with a relatively large population, and especially a population where there’s quite a lot of vulnerability, in terms of the building types to earthquake shaking. So, construction using unreinforced masonry, the kind of more rural styles that sadly are not very strong when earthquakes hit,” he explains.
“One big thing as well is the fact that it occurred in the nighttime, past 11pm local time, and people were at home, they were asleep, in buildings that would have been quite vulnerable to the shaking. And so, a lot of people would have become trapped within the rubble.”
