Risk register · entry
Q2 · The CoconutAl Haouz earthquake
A moderate quake killed thousands because mudbrick homes had no survival voids.
The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.
Why this room
The earthquake itself is a textbook Coconut risk, a single, physically simple trigger with a thin, well-modeled annual probability for any one valley, but decades of unreinforced mudbrick construction converted that thin tail into a fat one, turning a rare, containable geological event into a complex, compounding humanitarian and reconstruction crisis rather than a simple, bounded loss.
The record
- September 8, 2023, 23:11 local time, quake occurrencecertain
- Moment magnitude 6.8-6.9 (USGS/Wikipedia), some Moroccan agency readings up to ~7.2certain
- Depth approximately 18-19 km, epicenter ~73.4 km southwest of Marrakesh near Ighilcertain
- 2,960 confirmed deathscertain
- 5,674 injuredlikely
- 2.8 million people affectedlikely
- 40,759 homes damaged, 19,095 fully collapsed (one tally); other assessments cite 59,674-69,674 buildings damageduncertain
- 2,930 villages impacted; 585 schools damagedlikely
- Approximately 300,000 people left homelesslikely
- $7 billion total estimated economic damageuncertain
- $11.7 billion, five-year government rehousing plan announced September 20, 2023certain
- Morocco's RPS 2000 seismic code exempts buildings using traditional earthen/local materials (mud, straw, wood, reeds) from its requirementslikely
- 1960 Agadir earthquake killed 12,000-15,000 people and prompted Morocco's first seismic building codecertain
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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