Edition 12
www.thecourier.es
Friday, May 13, 2011
LORCA CRUMBLES 90,000 sleep on the streets as biggest quake for 50 years hits medieval town
Spain ‘united’ to help residents By Dave Bull in Lorca AS I walked the streets of Lorca yesterday morning, Lorca was still shrouded in the eerie quiet which had descended on the town since the second of two devastating earthquakes that killed at least two pregnant women and up to eight others the previous evening. People stood around either stunned or with nothing else to do. Their home, business or job gone, there was nothing left for these poor people to do other than wait. What they were waiting for nobody seemed to be sure, apart from the hope that the authorities would somehow organise the essentials that we normally take for granted, such as water and power and food. Lorca’s 90,000 population suffered on Wednesday, with at least 130 injured and damage everywhere you look in this beautiful and historic town. Every building I passed had been affected in some way and every street had a similar story. In total, some 20,000 buildings are estimated to have been damaged by the quakes.
Devastating On Wednesday evening at 6.45pm the second and most devastating tremor hit Lorca. A quake registering 4.4 on the Richter scale had rocked the town at five o’clock without causing too much damage. But the one that followed reached 5.2 to become the worst earthquake to hit Spain in more than 50 years. As I walked the streets yesterday, hundreds of
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