Rescue teams frustrated Morocco did not accept more international help after quake

PARIS — The text-message alert got here in the course of the night time: An enormous earthquake had hit Morocco. French volunteers scrambled to tug in combination a nine-person search-and-rescue crew, listening gadgets and different tools to search for folks buried beneath rubble.

The handiest factor the French help staff did not have was once a inexperienced gentle from Morocco to hop on a flight, which may have landed them within the North African nation’s crisis zone little more than 24 hours after the Sept. 8 quake that killed more than 2,900 folks and injured a minimum of 5,530 others in flattened villages and townhouses.

“The green light never came,” mentioned Arnaud Fraisse, the crew’s coordinator and founding father of help crew Rescuers Without Borders. “All of our team members who train regularly year-round for this type of thing are miserable that they couldn’t leave and put their skills to use.”

Aid teams in Europe are frustrated that Morocco did not throw open its doorways to outdoor help as Turkey did for a devastating quake in February. Quickly greedy the huge scale of the crisis, Turkey inside hours appealed for international help, which enabled rescue crews from 90 nations to tug masses of folks out alive.

Morocco has taken a more restricted method. It accredited government-offered search-and-rescue crews from Spain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the U.Okay., nevertheless it has not taken up different gives of emergency the aid of the United States, France and somewhere else.

The causes seem partially logistical. Aid mavens mentioned rescue teams may also be more of a hindrance than a help if all of them rush in uninvited and with out coordination.

And briefly getting them to Morocco’s crisis zone within the Atlas Mountains may have been tricky. Roads and mud tracks that may be exhausting to navigate at the most efficient of occasions had been destroyed and blocked via fallen rocks. Morocco additionally has dangerous recollections of chaotic international help that adopted some other fatal quake in 2004.

After the most recent temblor, the Interior Ministry cautioned that poorly coordinated help “would be counterproductive.”

Moroccan Sen. Lahcen Haddad, who additionally up to now served as the rustic’s tourism minister, mentioned the rapid precedence was once clearing roads and achieving survivors.

“We don’t need numbers. We need speedy work to get to the population. We have enough people to do that,” he said in an Associated Press interview.

“If there is aid, it will be later,” he added. “In any case, for those people who are impatient to help, there will be enough work for everyone.”

Caroline Holt of the International Federation of the Red Cross agreed that accessing some quake-hit areas “is extremely complex” and said “the Moroccan government is taking careful steps with regard to opening up.”

“One of the worst things to do in an already chaotic situation is to introduce further uncertainty and potential chaos by opening the doors and everybody coming in,” she said.

Fraisse acknowledged that dozens of well-meaning search teams arriving together from overseas could have been overwhelming. And he noted that other countries have also rejected help from rescue teams like his, including Armenia in 1988.

But he also knows how precious time is when there are lives to be saved. Whisked part of the way by military helicopter, his team reached a disaster zone in Turkey about 48 hours after the quake that killed more than 50,000 people. Rescue deployments were “extremely well-coordinated,” he said. But the French rescuers were still too late — sometimes by agonizing margins — to recover survivors.

Some dead bodies they found were still warm, Fraisse recalled.

He suspects that political tensions between France and Morocco are another reason why his team’s offer wasn’t acted upon. They contacted the Moroccan Embassy in Paris within hours of the quake, but “it is been radio silence since then,” he mentioned.

“We are paying the price for the quarrel,” he mentioned. “We accept it. It’s part of the game. We’re not going to fight states to say ‘You absolutely have to accept us.’”

Germany, which also has had tensions with Morocco in recent years but now has warmer relations than France, was not taken up on its offer to send a 50-person rescue team and dogs. The team assembled in the quake’s immediate aftermath at a German airport before being told to stand down.

A Czech rescue service also readied a 70-person team that stayed grounded.

“It could be political, religious or any other reasons,” Vladimir Vlcek, its director general, told Czech public radio Tuesday. “The longer it’s not on time, the slimmer is an opportunity for any person to live to tell the tale beneath the rubble.”

Patricia McIlreavy, CEO of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, mentioned Morocco’s reaction does not appear to be slowing help from charities and nonprofits. Her Washington-based nonprofit advises donors on efficient giving following failures.

“It’s very easy from the outside to criticize and say, ‘Well, if they just took all this assistance that we’re offering, everything would be fine,’” she said. “But it’s actually a lot of work to coordinate an international response.”

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Associated Press newshounds Glenn Gamboa in New York; Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey; Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin; Karel Janicek in Prague; and Sam Metz in Marrakech, Morocco, contributed to this record.