SPAIN’S PRIME minister and members of the royal family consoled residents in the southern town of Lorca yesterday as rescue teams and engineers continued to assess the damage from Wednesday’s deadly earthquake.
José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the government had sent about 800 personnel to the town, including emergency units, troops and police, and pledged the state’s help in enabling life in the area return to normal as soon as possible.
Nine people died and more than 120 were injured when a 5.1-magnitude earthquake struck near Lorca on Wednesday evening, causing buildings to collapse and masonry to fall across the town. It was Spain’s deadliest quake in half a century.
“It is my conviction that we are going to meet this test,” Mr Zapatero said during the visit. “The earthquake was hard and strong. But this country is stronger. Its desire for solidarity and reconstruction are stronger.”
At a funeral Mass for four of the victims, held in a trade centre that has been turned into a makeshift refugee camp, Crown Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia hugged and shook hands with relatives of the nine people killed on Wednesday.
Among those who died were a 13-year-old boy and a 22-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Other funerals were being held elsewhere in Lorca.
Thousands of residents of the town slept for a second night on the streets, unable to return home after the earthquake destroyed masonry and building facades, crushed cars and littered streets with bricks. Many of Lorca’s 90,000 residents were still waiting for housing inspectors to give them the green light to enter buildings.
Some residents were briefly allowed back into their homes yesterday to salvage what belongings they could from the rubble, but Lorca’s mayor said that of about 550 buildings inspected so far by engineers and architects, more than half were uninhabitable.
Seismologists said they expected smaller aftershocks in the area, which lies close to the geological fault line separating Europe and Africa.
The quakes were shallow and caused significant damage despite being relatively low in magnitude, while the region’s sandy soil also made the impact worse.
Meanwhile, President Mary McAleese wrote to King Juan Carlos and the mayor of Lorca to express her sympathy with the people of a town that has long connections to Ireland.
On St Patrick’s Day each year, the Irish flag is hoisted and Amhrán na bhFiann is played in the town’s Plaza de España.
The link can be traced to March 17th, 1442, the date of a battle near the town between Christian and Muslim troops. After the victory of the Christian troops, it was decided to declare St Patrick as patron saint and to build a church in his honour.
Construction began on a Church of Saint Patrick in 1533 and it was completed in the 17th century.
The Murcia region is a popular destination for Irish holidaymakers, but coastal regions were largely unaffected by the tremor. The Department of Foreign Affairs said it had received no reports of Irish people in difficulty.