Quake survivors face threat of disease

FOREIGN rescue teams left earthquake-torn Algeria yesterday, but the nightmare went on for 15,000 homeless people facing the threat of disease and public fury mounted over the government’s handling of the calamity.

State radio said there were fears disease could break out across ravaged towns of the North African country’s Mediterranean coast due to a lack of clean water and sanitation.

The official toll from last Wednesday’s quake, which at 6.7 on the Richter scale was Algeria’s most severe in more than two decades, rose slightly to 2,212 dead and 9,085 injured.

But with hundreds still unaccounted for under the rubble of buildings that collapsed in Algiers and towns east of the capital, the body count looked set to climb still higher.

Several days of frantic searching for survivors appeared to be over as elite teams with sniffer dogs from around the world dogs headed for the airport.

“There’s nothing more we can do. Anyone that’s under all that is dead, not alive,” said one, as he gathered his bags together in an Algiers hotel.

On Sunday many of the teams had resigned themselves to the inevitable, standing aside as fork trucks and cranes ripped apart what was left of flattened buildings to uncover blackened and bloated bodies.

But state television reported that rescue workers had pulled out alive from the rubble a 13-year-old girl in Bordj Menaiel and a woman in Corso on Sunday, four days after the quake struck the oil-rich Maghreb nation.

Schools in the eastern province of Boumerdes, where most of the deaths occurred, were closed until further notice.

Shock and grief gave way to anger at the weekend as more and more people turned on the government, accusing it of doing little to help the homeless and turning a blind eye to shoddy construction in a quake-prone area.

Crowds chanted “assassin” at President Abdelaziz Bouteflika as he visited devastated towns.

Some protesters threw stones and kicked his car.

The image of rare popular dissent against the military-backed authorities was repeated in a front-page picture of the daily Le Matin yesterday under the headline:

“Mr Bouteflika, never come back!” Le Soir d’Algerie paper said there had been a riot at a housing complex in the town of Thenia, where residents had blocked a road and threatened to stop traffic along the national highway if the authorities did not come to their aid.

The Centre for Research in Seismic Studies said 1,000 aftershocks had been felt in Algeria since Wednesday, the government-backed newspaper El Moudjahid reported.