Morocco earthquake
\n RABAT
\nThe large rotary blades of a military helicopter fire up, lifting emergency supplies towards villages otherwise cut off from the world.
\nThey\u2019re also shuttling the injured and dead away from the epicentre.
\nAn enormous cloud of dust engulfs dozens of survivors and emergency teams who have descended on the town of Talat Nyakoub, at the epicentre of the earthquake to dig for the living and recover the dead.
\nThere is hope that loved ones didn\u2019t die when the quake hit the Atlas Mountains here in Morocco, but the smell of dead bodies is at times overpowering and the grim faces of rescue workers speak volumes.
\nDozens, sometimes hundreds, of people gather at a newly-formed road created when the street below disintegrated.
\nBeneath them, groups of rescue workers operating in teams of between six and 12 dig their way through the rubble.
\nThere is little chatter, the sounds of drills and pickaxes fill the air. The occasional sound of somebody wailing punctuates the near silence. A sad indicator that another body has been found.
\nThis is a desperate race to save lives but as each hour passes here, hope fades.
\nRescue workers say finding survivors is difficult, not only because of the heat, but because of the amount of time that has passed since the earthquake struck and the severity of that impact.
\nWhole streets have been utterly destroyed in what survivors say was more like an enormous explosion rather than the shaking of an earthquake.
\nThey described how the ground and buildings blew upwards from the earth before collapsing. Multi-storey buildings are now pancaked.
\nAir Said Mohamed says he rescued more than a dozen people before rescue workers got here.
\n\u201cSometimes you find someone alive, sometimes not, they have already died,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there is hope, I rescued three people here and 10 in the other village above.\u201d
\nIn the blistering heat, rescuers dig through the rubble looking for survivors, but in all honesty, they\u2019re expecting to find the dead.
\nWhile we filmed, we saw many dead but we saw no survivors.
\nWhen a body is found, it is extracted from the rubble, wrapped in a blanket and placed on an orange stretcher.
\nRecovery teams then take the body to a dusty car park that has become the main gathering point for the relief effort.
\nThey\u2019re usually followed by the family, almost all in tears.
\nWe watched as the body of 18-year-old Heba was recovered and placed on the ground in the car park. She was only visiting her family here Heba was a student living in Marrakech.
\nHer family survived, she did not. Her mother and father cried and hugged, while their relatives tried to support them. They were inconsolable.
\nYou see this scene time and again at the epicentre. I met Fatima standing on the ridge watching relief efforts. She has lost 10 members of her family already and told me others are still missing.
\n\u201cThe rescue workers are doing a really good job but look at everything they have to dig through concrete, sand rocks\u2026 it\u2019s very difficult,\u201d she said.
\nShe has given up hope of anyone still being alive. \u201cWithin seconds everything fell down, some people managed to run out of their houses, others didn\u2019t make it,\u201d she said.
\nAlthough most of the rescue work is done by hand, the teams occasionally use drills powered by generators to break through the exposed floors and ceilings of the buildings it\u2019s hard to differentiate between the two.
\nYoussef Id Mesouad was here when the body of his mother was removed from the family home. He\u2019s returned with his uncle and cousins to wait for the relief teams to find the body of his father.
\nHe stands with them on top of the house, now a pile of rubble, gesturing and explaining the layout of the house.
\nYoussef knows there is no hope left for his father. He told me his mother\u2019s body was found near the ceiling of the house, not underneath it.
\nThroughout the day the bodies of the newly recovered were laid in a row in the car park. Their families sitting beside them, waiting to take them away.
\nYoussef knows his father will be one of them, he\u2019s just waiting for him to be found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Morocco earthquake RABAT The large rotary blades of a military helicopter fire up, lifting emergency supplies towards villages otherwise cut off from the world. They\u2019re also shuttling the injured and dead away from the epicentre. An enormous cloud of dust engulfs dozens of survivors and emergency teams who have descended on the town of Talat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355364,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-355354","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n