From drive event to disaster relief

This week (writes Guild Committee member Jim McGill) I should have completed Mazda’s latest annual Epic Drive, this year travelling 1100kms in 36 hours through the Atlas Mountains. Not surprisingly, the devastating earthquake in Morocco at 11.11pm last Friday meant the event was swiftly cancelled on Saturday morning.

While, however, we all read the news and watched the images as the death toll rose dramatically, from 290 early on Saturday morning to close to 3,000 as I write this, Mazda UK PR Director Graeme Fudge and the rest of the Mazda events crew were doing what they could to help those in need in the villages devastated by the earthquake. 

I spoke with Graeme on Monday (11th Sept) after he had returned to the Mazda base in Marrakech following two days in the mountains. Here he describes first-hand the moment the earthquake hit, followed by the work the team found themselves doing helping the impacted areas and some of the scenes he witnessed.

“I’m a bit knackered after the past two days. On Friday night we were in a restaurant on the third floor of a building in Marrakech. It was around ten past 11, and it just felt like a large steamroller was going past the building – everything started shaking; everything on the table was bouncing up and down. Everybody in the restaurant just legged it and at that point we realised it was probably something more than a steamroller. 

All of us then evacuated the restaurant and stood out in the street with everyone else for about half-an-hour until we realised “okay, the building’s not going to fall down”. So I went in and paid the bill — which they were very grateful for — and then quite literally we went back to the hotel, which was still standing, and went to bed.

On the way back to the hotel, we did see some damage. There was a mosque on which the minaret had come down at the entrance to the souk and a bit of damage inside the souk. On the main mosque, in the square, there was quite a bit of rubble where obviously a wall had collapsed. But to be honest, the damage in Marrakech was absolutely minimal compared to what we then witnessed in other places we visited over the next two days. 

It wasn’t until the next morning when we saw the headlines and realised what hadn’t actually felt a particularly bad quake the night before — it lasted for exactly 44 seconds — had already killed at least 290 people. We also then knew that a couple of the towns in the mountains were deep under rubble, with people trapped and desperately in need of help.

We decided that, as we had a paramedic with us and many of the towns and villages which had been impacted didn’t have any emergency services and were in desperate need of water, we would go up into the mountains and offer what assistance we could.

The paramedic and I jumped in a car at around 9am, and with Keith, Mark, Daz and Steve in other cars we headed up to the first village, Ouirgane. When we got there it was very obvious that the things they needed were medical aid, water and food. We had a load of water with us, but unfortunately not food.

So we started handing out water — we had 380 bottles in the back of the car — and that went really quickly; probably in around five minutes. There was somebody from the town who was obviously co-ordinating efforts from a villager point of view. He started pointing us in the right direction to where the water was needed most urgently. 

The paramedic, also named Graeme, made himself known to the villager and within minutes he was being asked to help people. 

The scale of the tragedy was demonstrated by the first person Graeme assisted; he had a suspected fractured skull and was advised to go to hospital, but was refusing as his family were still under the rubble and he did not want to leave them. Sadly they did not survive.

The guy in the village then took us to multiple locations where people needed help and Graeme did what he could. Mostly it was walking wounded – there were some really nasty lacerations, a guy with a badly damaged foot, while another’s arm had opened up where he’d been hit by falling debris. Another had chest wounds and there were a lot of head wounds, things like that. 

Realising there was a massive need for water, we sent Keith and the guys back into town to bring more water up and hand it out. By this point the villagers had started to co-ordinate themselves into something resembling managed chaos and we started to get the water to people who needed it as opposed to those who were just being opportunistic in getting water for free. We were up there until probably seven on the Saturday evening just doing what we could – we’d been on-site since about 10am.

Having come back down, we then decided that actually more help was required. I texted Jeremy (Thomson, Mazda UK MD) to say “look, tomorrow I’m going to spend a load of money to buy water and food to take to the stricken villages in the mountains”. 

He got hold of Martijan (ten Brink), our European President, to ask “is this okay?”, and was told, “definitely; spend what you need, within reason, and take it up there”.

I think we spent £1000 on water the following day. We filled up three CX-5s, two pick-ups and a Land Cruiser and headed back up to the village we’d been in the day before. When we arrived, the same guy who had been co-ordinating with us on the Saturday jumped into one of the CX-5s just to make sure the water was going to the right people.

Then we were asked if we could get the rest of the water in the two pick-ups and the Land Cruiser up to a helicopter supply point in the mountains. We were sent off to this village called Talat N’Yaaqoub, which had been cut off the day before. 

They had managed to open up the road — this was, in fact, the route we were going to use on the Epic Drive but was now very different to what it had been a few days previous when we last drove it. There had been massive landslides along its length. 

It was only a single-track road for most of it, so we ended up getting stuck when other vehicles were coming in the opposite direction.

The sides of the mountains were still unstable – when we were stopped and looked up you could still see rocks and scree coming down. In one location they had cut through what had been an avalanche/rockfall, but they’d essentially left a wall of the avalanche: it was probably 15 feet high. That’s when I thought, “I really don’t want to be sitting here”.

There was a Mercedes MPV which had been taken out by a rockslide just about half-an-hour before we got there. Thankfully the occupants had got out safely. There was also a Dacia Duster which had been completely pulverised under the avalanche. 

We finally got up to this village, which was right at the epicentre of the quake and was completely flat – there’s no other way to describe it. There wasn’t a single building left standing. People’s homes, businesses and livelihoods had been taken from them in 44 seconds. It was a really lovely village, and standing on the hill as you approached it had been a 200 to 300-year-old fort. That had completely gone. 

Once we got to the village, we were trying to locate the helicopter supply point, but we couldn’t find it. So we started giving out water to people who obviously needed it, particularly the rescuers. There were a lot of people still looking for bodies and survivors in the rubble. 

Two- and three-storey buildings were now less than a storey high. We could see mattresses sticking out from the side of what had been bedrooms where the flat roof had just collapsed downwards. 

Rescue teams from Turkey, France and the Moroccan army had by now arrived in the town and the townspeople were getting the help and support they needed. They had running water in the village, but it was just one single standpipe. So they were actually quite grateful for bottled water to be able to give to the people working, and then they could refill the bottles themselves.

Then a guy came along and said he was going up to a couple of the villages which were inaccessible by car and asked if he could take some of the water. So we gave him half the water we had to take to the even more remote villages. We gave the kids some sweets and crisps, and then I thought that us staying here now was just getting in the way, so we decided to head back.

Returning to Marrakech was an adventure in itself. This road now being open, every man and his dog were trying to drive along it. At one point I was sitting underneath an overhanging rock which didn’t look particularly stable, with two large army trucks rumbling past very slowly and a drop of about 500ft next to me. I was thinking, “maybe my judgement is a little questionable here”. 

We made it back, the whole round trip on the Sunday having taken about 11 hours. The first bit of it to the first village had taken an hour, the last 35kms out to the second village, and 35 back, nearer 10 hours. 

It was pure devastation and very sad to see. We did what we could, however small that contribution was.” 

(Mazda UK PR Director Graeme Fudge was speaking to Jim McGill)