At least 22 people have died and another 16 have been injured, several of them very seriously, after the collapse of two adjacent residential buildings in the city of Fez, 200 kilometers east of Rabat. The incident occurred shortly before midnight from Tuesday to Wednesday in the Al Mostaqbal (El Porvenir, in Arabic) neighborhood in a peripheral district, when two buildings several stories high collapsed.
This is a “preliminary assessment”, according to the Fez Prosecutor’s Office, which has opened an investigation. A total of eight families lived in the two buildings. The buildings that have collapsed had been built in 2007 with a license for a ground floor plus two floors, but were raised above the official permit.
One of the buildings, four stories high (two more than allowed) was unoccupied, while in the other, five stories high and inhabited by at least eight families, a celebration of celebration was being held. aqeeqahIslamic ritual for the social presentation of a newborn. “We are not going to be able to sleep peacefully. We are scared. We live on the fifth floor, and on the same street where the collapse occurred,” said Shuría, 40 years old, mother of four children. “No one has come here to inspect the houses,” he lamented.
This neighborhood of simple apartment blocks in the Bensuda district arose in the southwest of Fez, on land that was occupied by shanty towns until the beginning of the century, and without apparent urban control. Lined on paved or cement streets, except for the open fields that occupy a popular market and the collective taxi rank, each property has a different height, configuration and finish. Cables of all kinds cross facades and roofs, where satellite dishes and internet connections appear.
Men and women dressed in both traditional clothing and modern clothing stood firmly observing the tragedy of their neighbors in the rain and cold of the industrial outskirts of Fez. There was only a piece of land strewn with rubble and twisted iron where a few hours before houses like theirs stood. Women served platters of couscous to members of the rescue teams, who left before sunset on Wednesday. The men wandered through the rubble of the accident area.
“The survivors said that some rubble had fallen with the rains of the previous week,” explained Mohamed Chubaid, 37, a computer scientist who had come to lend a hand from a nearby neighborhood. The residents still alive from the houses that collapsed are all in the hospital, in a bed or accompanying injured relatives.
“I would have died too”
“If the collapse had occurred in the morning, I would have died too,” explains mechanic Adelkrim Huja, 36, with a bewildered face, who had an automobile paint shop on the premises of the building while pointing to the part of a chassis waiting to be reviewed in the middle of a lot of rubble. He lived on the ground floor with nine members of his family in the building where the victims died until a few years ago when he moved to a nearby apartment. “Before, we were in a shanty, like everyone else in this neighborhood, until the State gave us land to build on and the towns were demolished between 2005 and 2006,” recovers the collective memory of a district of slum dwellers rehoused in self-construction programs at the beginning of the reign of Mohamed VI. “Now again I have nothing to live on. I only wait for God’s help,” he laments, consoled by three neighbors.
The price of an apartment in Al Mostaqbal reaches up to 150,000 dirhams, just under 15,000 euros, 500 times the amount of the minimum wage in Morocco. An average rent ranges between 700 and 1,000 dirhams. In the house adjacent to the collapsed buildings, Adil, a 41-year-old cabinetmaker, has gone to take care of the home of some relatives, whom he has taken in in a nearby apartment. He appears somber, clad in his winter djellaba. “They were all saved without suffering any damage. They heard a loud bang and they all went out into the street. Shortly after, the two buildings on the corner collapsed in the middle of a large cloud of dust,” he says.
Emergency services arrived soon, according to residents, and were able to save the survivors shortly after midnight on Wednesday. By early afternoon the rescue work had already ceased. In the absence of official information, residents consider the two-week-old baby dead, who was welcomed to life with a ritual celebration.
Other residents of the area have assured the Moroccan state television channel SNRT that the two collapsed buildings had cracks and that their inhabitants had notified the authorities, without having received notice of a technical inspection.
The Fez Prosecutor’s Office has ordered that, in addition to a police investigation into the causes of the collapse of the buildings, local urban planners be required to present construction plans in the affected area and the permits and licenses granted.
A survivor told the Medi1 television channel that he had lost his wife and three of his children in the accident, which occurred when he was outside the property.
Fez, the third most populated city in Morocco and former imperial capital, features its 8th century medina among the main tourist attractions of the Maghreb country. The affected district is located away from the historic center, in a residential and industrial area of the city.
Last May, nine people lost their lives in the same city when a building that had been classified as at risk of collapse by the authorities collapsed. The collapse now recorded in Fez has been the deadliest in the last three decades, since the fall of the minaret of a mosque in the neighboring city of Meknes that occurred in 2010 in the middle of mass Friday prayers.
The Secretary of State for Housing, Adib Ben Ibrahim, assured at the beginning of the year that in Morocco there are some 38,000 buildings at risk of collapse, according to a report cited by Reuters. Last summer, Mohamed VI warned in a speech of the emergence of a “Morocco at two speeds”, between the developed coastal strip and the impoverished interior of the Maghreb country.
The royal warning had a loud echo in the social protests of the young people of generation Z last October, in which they demanded better public services, more hospitals and university faculties and fewer stadiums, such as those built in the short term for upcoming sporting events. Fez will host a phase of the 2030 World Cup, co-organized with Spain and Portugal, and the African Cup of Nations, which begins in Morocco in just two weeks.
