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Posted on 06/22/2002 2:50:29 PM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
At least 500 die in Iran mountain quake
Sat Jun 22, 2:50 PM ET
By Parisa Hafezi
CHANGOUREH, Iran (Reuters) - A powerful earthquake ( news - web sites) in northern Iran killed at least 500 people and injured 1,500 on Saturday, reducing dozens of mountain villages to dust.
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State television said there were too many contradictory figures to be sure how many had died.
In the village of Changoureh, a Reuters correspondent counted about 150 bodies wrapped in blankets laid out in the square.
More bodies lay in twos and threes on the streets outside wrecked houses. Villagers carried more dead on ladders and old doors to add to dozens of fresh graves on a hillside.
The quake struck in the early morning, just before 7:30 a.m. (0300 GMT), killing many women, children and elderly people at home whilst men were out working in the fields and vineyards.
THOUSANDS HOMELESS
Helicopters and rescue teams searched for survivors in the grape-growing area around the epicentre Avaj, 200 km (130 miles) west of the capital Tehran.
Villagers in Changoureh, 30 km (18 miles) north of Avaj, complained that emergency services had been slow to arrive.
"At nine o'clock in the morning we managed to call for help, but no one came. Only now they are sending help," said village council head Jamshid Amiri as the afternoon wore on. "We have asked for sniffer dogs, but they still haven't sent any."
Not a single house remained undamaged in the village, made up of expensive second homes belonging to richer families from the provincial capital Qazvin and Tehran.
Red Crescent officials said 5,000 houses had been completely destroyed and 25,000 people made homeless, with at least four strong aftershocks inflicting more damage.
Villagers in Esmailabad, 10 km north of Avaj, recovered 38 bodies - one in nine of the population -- and picked through the ruins to look for more of the missing among the wooden roof timbers that jutted into the air.
Mohsen, 12, is now alone - his three sisters, brother, mother, father and grandmother all died, but he had set out for school. Wide-eyed, silent and shaking, he stood before the tangled rubble of his home nestled in the fertile mountains.
"I've lost everyone," another man wailed as he poured earth over his head.
Women squatted in the dust, crying out as they rocked back and forth. A Muslim cleric read a prayer for the dead laid out in the village square before relatives buried them on a hill.
OVERWHELMED
A medical official in Qazvin said 206 dead had been taken to one hospital in the city and 170 to another.
A town of 3,600 people, Avaj is close to the top of a high pass through rugged mountains, with the nearest peak towering 2,860 metres above. Its hospital was overwhelmed.
"We have 100 beds in the hospital. They keep bringing more people every minute, but we can't handle any more," an official said.
Most houses in the region, famed for the seedless grapes that grow on the mountainsides, are single-storey and made of mud brick, which experts say does not stand up well to quakes.
"Usually with this kind of building we lose a lot of people," Professor Fariborz Nateghi, a government advisor on earthquake engineering, told Reuters. "You lose the walls and the ceiling collapses They are major killers."
President Mohammad Khatami ( news - web sites) sent a message of condolence. He told Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari to personally take charge of the "grave responsibilities that the government and the nation have in this tragic event", IRNA said.
TURNED TO DUST
Earthquakes ( news - web sites) are a regular occurrence in Iran, which is crossed by several major faultlines, but rarer in this region.
On May 10, 1997, a tremor measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale killed 1,560 people in eastern Iran near the Afghan border.
Qazvin, like Tehran, sits in the foothills of the Alborz mountain range, which skirts the south coast of the Caspian Sea.
Experts say earthquakes here are infrequent, but that means pressure in the faultlines builds up, giving them extra force.
In Esmailabad, Maryam, a teenager, was lucky to survive. Her mother, sister and sister's two children were crushed to death.
"The ground started to shake and we wanted to run away but we couldn't," she said. "They found me because my hand was sticking out of the rubble and pulled me out."
One man and his wife fled their home just in time.
"We threw ourselves outside," the man said, "and saw that instead of a village there was just dust."
Earthquakes in these radical fundamentalist countries really demonstrate over and over again that Islam is, indeed, a religion of pieces.
My truly heartfelt sympathies to the poor souls who live (and die) under the heel of cruel despots and souless imams.
Leni
Now where is my tinfoil?
I'd be happy to send several waves of B-52s loaded with 500 and 1000 pounders!
Eerily similar to when some of our own religious nuts like Robertson and Falwell blame the sinners for natural disasters here.
Doesn't really qualify as a "major" quake magnitude-wise; 7.0 and higher is considered "major." There are 120 magnitude 6 to 7 earthquakes in the world each year; hence, it's a virtual mathematical certainty that there will be one or two earthquakes this size EVERY shuttle flight.
There's an average of 19 earthquakes a year of magnitude 7 or higher; there was a BELOW average number of major earthquakes last year, and we're WELL below average so far this year.
The other kooks are all the premillenialist/apocalyptic nutjobs who cobble together a list of routine volcanic/seismic activity and start prattling about "all those earthquakes/volcanoes we've had recently!" as a sign the end of the world is coming; accomplished liars, they are. Since Pinatubo major world volcanic activity has been way, way down, and numbers of large earthquakes have been stable, with a downturn last year (15, when 19 are normal) and WAY down this year (1/2 way through the year, only 5 major earthquakes.)
Maybe there's something we could do to help.
I also prefer wrapping my head in tinfoil to keep the government control waves from affecting my thought patterns. Ya never can be too sure!
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