Army and emergency workers pitched tents for thousands of evacuees after a 5.1-magnitude quake smashed through an historic Spanish city, killing nine people and injuring 130.
The nine, including one child, died when Spain’s deadliest quake in more than 50 years rocked the southeastern city of Lorca on Wednesday, the regional government of Murcia said.
The death toll rose overnight because one of the injured had died, said a spokesperson for the Murcia health services.
The quake, which flattened some buildings, ripped open many walls and sent chunks of masonry flying into the streets, injured another 130 people, regional emergency services chief Luis Gestoso said.
Stones, bricks, cornices, collapsed terraces and crumpled cars filled the streets and forced huge numbers of the town’s 93Â 000 inhabitants to evacuate their homes.
Historical buildings damaged
About 20Â 000 buildings, including many from the 16th and 17th centuries, were reported damaged in Lorca, which traces its history back more than 2,000 years. Mayor Francisco Jodar said 80% of the city’s buildings were damage.
The clocktower of the 17th century San Diego Church tumbled and smashed into pieces, narrowly missing a television reporter as he delivered a report on Spanish public broadcaster TVE. Its bronze bell lay in the street.
“Almost no one slept in their homes last night,” the city mayor said, some taking shelter in other towns, their cars, streets, parks and public squares.
Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez sent his condolences for the relatives of the dead and said the government was acting quickly to confront “this catastrophe”.
The government had sent in 800 personnel, half of them military emergency units and troops and the rest police, to help shelter the “very high number of people who have been left without a home”.
They were racing to set up more than 370 army tents and a field hospital with doctors, he said. The military emergency units had 140 vehicles to help clear the debris, the prime minister said.
With extensive damage to homes, public buildings, and water pipes, emergency workers were checking which can be repaired and which would have to be demolished, the premier said.
“We will spare no effort for the reconstruction.”
The Red Cross said it had six emergency teams who had distributed more than 2Â 000 beds and 10Â 500 blankets.
Spain’s seismological authorities predicted smaller after-shocks in the next month in the region, which lies on a geological fault line. Regional authorities said there were no reports of missing people and the death toll was not expected to rise significantly.
The president of Spain’s College of Geologists, Luis Suarez, said the quake released energy equal to 200 tons of TNT and he expected the intensity of aftershocks to diminish.
A quake of this scale was not strong enough to bring buildings to the ground, and the scale of the damage must have been due to pre-existing problems, Suarez said in a statement.
“We know we live near a fault line but we never thought this would happen to us,” said Pepe Tomas, 56, a male nurse at a local clinic who has lived his whole life in the city.
Tomas said he had helped treat hundreds of people “mostly for anxiety,” after the earthquake struck at 6:47pm (16:47 GMT) on Wednesday at a depth of just 10km.
The shock could be felt as far away as the capital Madrid. It hit nearly two hours after a smaller 4.4-magnitude quake.
The Socialist Party’s Zapatero and his conservative Popular Party opponent Mariano Rajoy agreed to suspend campaigning for regional elections May 22 because of the disaster.
A total of 350 ambulances transferred 400 patients out of two of the town’s hospitals, one of which sustained structural damage, the regional government said.
It was the deadliest earthquake in Spain since April 19, 1956 when a tremor wrecked buildings and killed 11 people in Albolote, a town in the southern Spanish province of Granada.
Ironically, it struck on the same day many residents stayed away from work in the Italian capital Rome fearing a supposed prophecy of a devastating tremor by a self-taught Italian seismologist who died in 1979. — Sapa-AFP