Earthquake - Iran

welsh

welsh

Junkmaster
Not sure if you have heard but a massive earthquake hit southern Iran.

Hope all is well if you have family there.

Here's the news from CNN. I hope the US joins this effort to help these folks.

Aid arrives as quake toll rises

Saturday, December 27, 2003 Posted: 10:34 AM EST (1534 GMT)

Injuried Iranians wait for assistance in Kerman airport.
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TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) -- The provisional death toll from a devastating earthquake in southeastern Iran has risen into the tens of thousands as rescue workers continue to scour through the debris for survivors and international aid begins to arrive.

The Interior Ministry says up to 20,000 people died in the quake and at least 30,000 were injured.

However, other government officials say the number of dead is much lower -- likely about 5,000. Others say an accurate casualty count was impossible with many victims still trapped and also the inaccessibility of some areas to rescue crews.

"The disaster is far too huge for us to meet all of our needs," Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said. "However, all the institutions have been mobilized."

The Interior Ministry's death toll estimate, broadcast on state television Saturday, came as rescuers franticly search for life under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

International aid began arriving in the ancient city of Bam on Saturday. An estimated 80 percent of the city, population 80,000, was destroyed in Friday's 6.3 magnitude quake including its hospitals and its main tourist draw, the 2,000-year-old citadel Arg-e-Bam.

The government has asked for international assistance, particularly search and rescue teams. The United States and several European nations have promised aid, which is expected to begin arriving to Bam on Saturday.

As Iran began three days of mourning, tens of thousands of survivors spent Friday night in the streets in bitter cold with temperatures plummeting to below zero degrees Celsius, many of them wearing little more than at the time of the quake.

The historic city was without water, gas or electricity throughout the night.

On Saturday, rescuers dug with shovels and bare hands to remove bodies and locate possible survivors from the ruins of flattened buildings. Bulldozers worked in some parts of the city.

Bodies, wrapped up in blankets or clothing, were lined up in the streets.

With the city's hospitals destroyed, many of the injured were transported to nearby towns and cities.

Journalist Shrizad Bozorgmehr told CNN that helicopters and C-130 transport planes had been moving thousands of people to neighboring provincial centers such as Kerman and even the capital, Tehran, about 610 miles (975 kilometers) away.

Bozorgmehr said rescue efforts were focusing on two priorities, digging out those trapped and providing temporary shelter and medical assistance to survivors.

Additionally, ruins and rubble brought on by the quake have hampered rescue efforts with little evidence of outside relief reaching the city, he said from Tehran.

Turkey, Russia, Spain, Britain and the United States are among the nations that responded to Iran's call for help.

Turkey plans to send "every possible assistance," including "tents, food, medicine -- whatever is needed," said a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Ankara.

More than 120 Russian emergency and medical officials will head to the disaster scene, along with equipment, a Russian emergency official said.

An aide to Spain's foreign minister said that nation is prepared to send humanitarian aid of various types.

The U.S. government said it is geared up to offer help, with the State Department drawing up a plan.

"We are offering humanitarian assistance," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said aboard Air Force One.

President George W. Bush issued a statement saying that Americans "stand ready to help the people of Iran."

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spoke to Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi and offered the services of two specialized search-and-rescue teams. Kharrazi welcomed the offer, and arrangements are under way through the Department for International Development, Straw said.

Five Iranian Red Crescent Society emergency relief teams from neighboring provinces have been sent to Bam.

The society has deployed two field hospitals and two helicopters to ferry the severely injured to hospitals as well as provide tents and medical supplies. Local volunteers also are assisting.

"The immediate priority is the search-and-rescue phase -- ensuring that survivors are located, given medical attention and transferred to the hospital," Mostafa Mohaghegh of the Iranian Red Crescent Society said in a statement.

The U.N. disaster management team in Tehran is sending two groups to the affected area "to collect, verify, and compile information on the extent and impact of the earthquake."

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is dispatching a 10-person team to assist in relief coordination. The office said it has made an initial $90,000 grant and is mobilizing 36-40 tons of relief items. These include blankets, kitchen sets, water distribution and purification units, high-energy biscuits and trauma kits.
 
That is a huge tragedy and if anyone has friends or family there, I send my condolences.

And locally the Red Cross is accepting donations to send over there, I donated all I could. Everybody else should too.
 
That sucks for everyone in Iran, I hope that not many people died....


And as both Dove and Welsh mentioned, I'm sorry if you had family there :cry:
 
I've seen some numbers as high as 40,000 dead. They are local officals numbers.

Freaking think about this: A city of 80,000 and the conservative estimates are 20,000 dead, 30,000 wounded.

Shit. We should be raising cash for this, not to try and help FO. Is that something we can do?
 
The Red Cross is something that was set up for situations like this, contact them if you want to help, but I am all for setting up some kind of pool that we can put together and send over there.
 
The news horrified and shocked me. Both the paper and the tv-news brought me close to tears. It's simply too horrible for words.

Good thing the Red Half Moon (it's a muslim country, Dove, they don't have the Red Cross) was quick to take action, and everyone's jumping in to help, 'specially the EU and Russia.
 
It is called the Red Crescent.

What are the numbers now? How many Zoroastrians where killed? It sounds like a holy site for them.....a former fire temple.
 
I meant to say the American Red Cross was taking action locally to receive donations (meaning in the U.S.), obviously the Red Crescent is who is actually distributing help. And last I heard, the U.S. government is working out a plan to send official aid.
 
In the past nations and empires have fallen because of the consequences of disasters. What will the the after effects for Iran?

Now wait for the political tremors

Dec 31st 2003
From The Economist print edition


The political after-effects of a terrible earthquake are already being felt

DISASTER could hardly have struck at a worse time or taken a less anticipated form. Before dawn on December 26th, a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, the sleeping town of Bam was all but razed by an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale. More than one-third of the town’s 80,000 inhabitants were killed, either immediately, or later in the rubble of their homes. The authorities were ill-prepared. It was Bam’s first big quake in a millennium.

New and old, public and private, the buildings of Bam had one thing in common: their disregard for anti-earthquake regulations. Even the swankiest homes collapsed: the governor was the only senior official to survive. Two hospitals were destroyed. Prisoners fled a wrecked jail on the edge of the town. One man, forewarned by a subterranean rumbling, had spent the night in his car. He survived but lost about 40 relations. Fearing after-shocks, survivors clogged the road to Kerman, the provincial capital.

In Tehran, Iran’s capital, more than 1,000km (621 miles) north-west, sclerotic state organs lumbered into action. The Iranian Red Crescent was hindered by the concentration of its stores and people in the quake-prone north. As a result, thousands of survivors in Bam spent two freezing nights without the tents they had been promised. The few bulldozers that arrived promptly to sift through the rubble stopped working at nightfall. Most “rescue” operations were in fact exhumations by the bereaved, using their bare hands.

On the whole, the Iranians seemed unable to co-ordinate the emergency teams that were dispatched from 26-odd countries, including the United States, the Islamic republic’s bitter enemy. Would-be rescuers were stuck in their own countries, while the Iranians got around to issuing them with formal invitations. When they arrived at Bam’s tiny airport, no one was on hand to guide them to those parts of the town where they would be of most help.

On Sunday evening, as supplies rolled belatedly into Bam, the authorities abandoned hope of finding more survivors, and foreign helpers prepared to go home. The interior minister said that more than 15,000 bodies had been buried; by Tuesday an official said the final death toll would exceed 28,000, though it was unclear whether that figure included the many casualties in villages nearby; by Wednesday, the most pessimistic estimates put the number of dead at between 40,000 and 50,000.

For a few days, the reformist supporters of President Muhammad Khatami and their rivals in the clerical establishment, which rallies around Iran’s “supreme leader”, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave up their vicious politicking. In scenes reminiscent of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, ordinary Iranians responded to the disaster by piling up food and clothes at collection points across the country.

In a trip to Bam on Monday, Mr Khamenei pledged that the town would be rebuilt, “stronger than ever”. That would be some feat. The town lost its Persian-speaking middle class long ago, to gradual migration. It, in turn, was replaced by tribal Baluchis, whom Persians tend to look on with distaste, partly for their reputation as traffickers of drugs.

More recently, the authorities tried to develop Bam by rebuilding the ancient town as a tourist attraction and by building a car factory on the edge of the desert. The plant still stands but the celebrated mud-brick citadel was ruined in the quake. As for the palms that produce Bam’s famously succulent dates, they survived. But the underwater channels that irrigated them may have collapsed.

Iran’s brief unity may not engender lasting good sense. Bam is too distant, its concerns too peripheral, for its agony to have much effect on building techniques in vulnerable cities like Tehran, where developers and regulators pay scant attention to best practice.

But the catastrophe may have one benign effect: a lessening of the Islamic republic’s distrust of foreigners. That distrust was evident in 1990, when the Iranians turned down many offers of outside help in the aftermath of a previous catastrophic quake and officials denounced sniffer dogs as “unclean”. Mr Khatami, in recent days, has showed no such qualms, appealing for help from all bar Israel. Some people in Bam were rescued thanks to the once-reviled canines.

Mr Khatami’s conservative rivals have mixed feelings about foreign help. During his trip to the area, the supreme leader did not deign to mention the mainly western countries that had rushed to Iran’s aid, let alone thank the rescuers in person. That is not untypical of Iran’s stand-offish conservatives. Last Friday, while survivors of the disaster surveyed the wreckage of their lives, Mr Khamenei found time to extol at length the merits of making the pilgrimage to Mecca.
 
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