DURRES, Albania — Still bleeding, the gash on his hand covered in dirty gauze, Xhafer Ahmetaj surveyed the mountain of rubble where his friends had been buried after an earthquake struck.

Only one teenage boy was pulled out alive. Eight other members of the Lala family, including two toddlers, were killed in November’s 6.4-magnitude quake. Mr. Ahmetaj, 79, a former military officer, took in the devastation and shook his head.

Nature, at its most violent, was to blame. But so, too, were people at their most greedy.

“If you would have seen this place when it was a marsh, a place where people came to fish, you wouldn’t think houses could ever have been built here,” Mr. Ahmetaj said. Yet they were built — the construction often compromised by corruption — in a pattern repeated across Albania, a small Balkan nation.

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• Πηγή: New York Times
• Ετικέτες: αλβανία, Βαλκάνια, σεισμός