While many international rescue teams withdraw from Morocco after six days of searchingthe Emergency and Immediate Response unit of the Community of Madrid (ERICAM) remains in Talat N’Yacub in the hope that the number of fatalities, which is close to 3,000 throughout the country, stop increasing in the next few days.

“I don’t think the number of victims will increase much more. It may be that some do in remote areas which have not been able to be accessed to clear debris, but have low population density. They will increase somewhat, but the normal thing is that not many more will come out,” explains the head of the device, fire officer Annika Coll, in statements to EFE.

Since they arrived early Sunday morning in Talat N’Yacub, a village of little more than 2,000 inhabitants and which has been one of the most affected by the 6.8 magnitude earthquake that shook the Atlas region last Friday, local and international search and rescue services have located 253 bodies and 127 people alive.

Although the inhabitants of the town where around thirty ERICAM troops are deployed – firefighters, SUMMA 112 paramedics and canine guides – no longer expect to find more people under the rubble, Coll and his team continue to wait for possible aftershocks or new rescue operations in nearby towns.

Meanwhile, many of the Spanish aid devices deployed in different parts of Morocco They have already begun their withdrawal.

“On Thursday morning we still had work, although we are waiting for the demobilization phase to begin. But things can arise, like the other night, that There was a fairly strong aftershock (4.6) and they have asked us to assemble a team to care for three injured people. “You never know when an intervention may come out,” she says.

So far, their tasks have focused on evaluating the terrain and providing support to Moroccan devices, participating only in the rescue of one body.

The Moroccan civil and military authority has “good means” to deal with the emergency and rejects the idea that, by rejecting help from countries like France, the Moroccan Government has made it difficult to rescue many victims.

“Deploying a lot of resources is not always the best way to respond. There is no need for 5,000 people working at the same time. because there are not 20,000 people under the rubble,” she counters, comparing the situation with the earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria last February, in which she was also a commissioner.

Moroccans do not feel alone

The first thing Coll remembers from Monday morning is the crying of a woman when she saw the state the town was inwhose houses, mostly made of adobe, had become rubble.

“People came to look for us, they told us where their relatives were, their houses. When something like this happens, people are lost, they don’t understand what happened because they have lost the most stable thing, which is their home,” he says.

Although in the town there is gratitude and displays of “affection and emotion” from the locals for making them feel “that they are not alone,” he emphasizes that they are the architects of the majority of the rescues, carried out immediately after the earthquake and that many Sometimes they are not even quantified.