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IMI N’TALA, Morocco (AP) \u2014 The rescue crews and bystanders are long gone but the remnants of homes still sit in piles off to the side of the jagged roads.<\/p>\n
A year after nearly 3,000 people died when a record earthquake<\/a> shook communities throughout Morocco’s High Atlas, it still looks like a bomb just went off in villages like Imi N’tala, where dozens of residents died when a chunk of mountainside cracked off<\/a> and flattened the majority of buildings.<\/p>\n Broken bricks, bent rods of rebar and pieces of kitchen floors remain but have been swept into neater piles alongside plastic tents where the displaced now live. Some await funds to reconstruct their homes. Others await approval of their blueprints.<\/p>\n The region shook by the earthquake is full of impoverished agricultural villages like Imi N\u2019tala accessible only via bumpy, unmaintained roads. Associated Press reporters revisited half a dozen of them<\/a> last week ahead of the one-year anniversary.<\/p>\n In some places, residents awaiting governmental permission have begun reconstructing homes on an ad hoc basis. Elsewhere, people tired of the stuffiness of plastic tents have moved back into their cracked homes<\/a> or decamped to larger cities, abandoning their old lives.<\/p>\n Streets have been neatly swept in towns like Amizmiz and Moulay Brahim<\/a>, although cracked buildings and piles of rubble remain, much as they were in the days after the quake.<\/p>\n The rhythms of normal life have somewhat resumed in some of the province\u2019s larger towns, where rebuilding efforts on roads, homes, schools and businesses are underway and some residents have been provided metal container homes. But the majority of those displaced from the 55,000 homes destroyed by the temblor remain vulnerable to summer\u2019s heat and winter\u2019s cold, living in plastic tents, impatient to return.<\/p>\n