Spain scrambles shelter, food for quake refugees

AFP/Lorca, Spain

Rubalcaba walks through a field as he arrives yesterday to meet rescue officials following the earthquake that rocked the town of Lorca

Army and emergency workers pitched tents and handed out food to thousands of evacuees yesterday after a 5.1-magnitude quake smashed through an historic Spanish city.Nine people, including a child, perished 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 earthquake struck at 6.47 pm (1647 GMT) Wednesday at a depth of just 10km, coming nearly two hours after a smaller 4.4-magnitude quake.Flattening some buildings, ripping open many walls and sending chunks of masonry flying into the streets, the tremor 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 93,000 inhabitants to evacuate their homes. Some 20,000 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 percent of the city’s buildings suffered some damage.The clock tower 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 mayor said.In the main market place hundreds of people including children in pushchairs waited in the hot sun for food packages containing powdered re-hydration drinks, jam, cereal bars and water. Others lined up for shelter.Six 20-person army tents and another 13 Red Cross tents were set up in the square and admitting evacuees including families. More army tents were ready to be erected.Red Cross official Jose Miguel Rebollo said the plan was to set up three tent sites together with the army to shelter 2,500 people. “Tonight we hope there will be fewer people than last night,” he said.Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez sent his condolences to the relatives of the dead and said the government was acting with maximum speed 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 many homeless, Zapatero said.The military emergency units had 140 vehicles to help clear the debris, he said. Emergency workers were checking building by building to decide which can be repaired and which would have to be demolished, the premier said. “We will spare no effort for the reconstruction,” he vowed.The government will approve today measures aimed at allowing the victims to resume their normal lives as soon as possible, Deputy Prime Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said during a visit to Lorca.Spain’s seismological authorities predicted smaller after-shocks in the next month in the region, which lies on a geological fault line. The president of Spain’s College of Geologists, Luis Suarez, said the quake released energy equal to 200 tonnes 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 structural 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”.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.