Terrified residents flee quake city

Thousands have fled the small agricultural city of Lorca, fearing destruction by major aftershocks after the country’s deadliest earthquakes in 55 years killed nine people and caused extensive damage.

Lorca was transformed into a ghost town, with a steady stream of cars carrying many of its 90,000 residents to nearby cities and towns to stay with relatives.

Stores, restaurants and schools were closed as the sirens of police vehicles and ambulances filled the air and helicopters hovered overhead.

Only a few people walked the streets. Tens of thousands spent the night outside in makeshift camps, and many of those who remained were poor Latin American immigrants who worked in the fields and had nowhere else to go.

Though Spain’s government promised to set up a shelter to house 3,500 people, Luis Vazquez was camping in a supermarket car park with his wife, 12-year-old daughter and four other families.

The unemployed Ecuadorean farm worker said his apartment was badly damaged and that he would soon have to ask for help. “I can’t care for my family without money, and now without a house,” he said.

The two quakes prompted an estimated 30,000 residents to sleep in cars, shelters fashioned from cardboard boxes and lawn chairs at makeshift camps in parks in the city about 19 miles inland from Mediterranean Sea beach destinations where little to no damage was reported.

Only a few buildings were destroyed, but the quakes with magnitudes of 4.5 and 5.1, according to Spain’s National Geographic Institute, sent brick building facades and parts of terraces plunging into the streets and caused damage to hundreds of apartment buildings.

While some people could not stay home, many others did not want to stay inside for fear of aftershocks.

“The whole façade and the stairs of the apartment where I live are totally broken,” resident Tomas Hinojo said. “The hardest things happened right where I live. Three of the victims killed are my neighbours.”

The Spanish institute said the second, larger quake was followed by 37 aftershocks lasting through the morning. The largest was about half an hour after midnight and measured 3.9.

Spanish experts said the second quake caused the most damage, and its power was more destructive than many quakes of similar magnitude because its epicentre was on the outskirts of Lorca and because it happened at the very shallow depth of about 0.6 miles below ground.

“That is very, very close to the surface,” said Maria Jose Jurado Rodriguez, a geologist with the Spanish National Research Council, the government’s top scientific research group. “That energy goes very directly to the inhabited area.”

The soil in the Murcia region where Lorca lies is loose and sandy, meaning it could not absorb earthquake energy as well as places that have more compact soil, said Ramon Aragon Rueda, head of the Murcia branch of the government’s Geological and Mining Institute.

Another Ecuadorean resident of Lorca, Edison Tixd, said he thought terrorists had hit the city when the quakes struck.

“I thought it was a bomb by al Qaida after what happened to (Osama) bin Laden,” said Mr Tixd, 26. “The sound was spine-chilling.”

A team of 200 architects and engineers have surveyed about 550 buildings in the most damaged areas of the city. A total of 17 per cent have structural damage, 38 per cent require residents to take caution upon entering and the rest are undamaged, says the Lorca town councillor responsible for public works, Jose Ballesta.

In one of the most dramatic images from the quake replayed over and over on Spanish television Thursday, chunks of stones and brick fell from the bell tower of the San Diego church in the city centre as a reporter for Spanish state TV was broadcasting live from the scene. The church’s bell also crashed down, just missing the reporter.