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CHANGOUREH (Iran), June 23: Iran’s Red Crescent on Sunday revised down the number of dead in a powerful earthquake in northern Iran to 222 from an earlier estimate of 500 as rescuers picked through rubble to find any remaining survivors.
“There was a mistake, the previous number was the number of dead and injured together,” state television reported Red Crescent official Majid Shalviri as saying.
Emergency services tried to cope with hundreds of injured and other survivors of the quake which measured 6.3 on the Richter scale, and took steps to prevent disease spreading.
The quake, which struck early on Saturday razing dozens of villages in north Iran’s Qazvin province, killed many women, children and elderly people at home while men were working in the fields and vineyards.
US President George W. Bush, who said he was saddened by news of the earthquake, extended an offer of humanitarian aid to Iran, reaching out to a country his administration has branded part of an “axis of evil”.
“Human suffering no political boundaries,” Bush said in a statement. “We stand ready to assist the people of Iran as needed and as desired.”
Red Crescent officials said 5,000 houses had been destroyed and 25,000 people made homeless, with at least four strong aftershocks inflicting more damage.
At least 1,500 people were injured, the heaviest casualties close to the epicentre at Avaj, a mountain town of 3,600 people some 200 kms west of the capital, Tehran.
Villagers in Esmailabad, 10 kms north of Avaj, recovered 38 bodies on Saturday — one in nine of the population — and sifted through ruins to look for more of the missing among wooden roof timbers jutting into the air.
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: The head of Iran’s Red Crescent said relief workers, food, more than 1,000 tents, 2,500 blankets and mobile kitchens had been dispatched to the stricken area. Extra ambulances had been sent, while the army was supplying water trucks.
The United Nations said it had sent a team to the area and the United States offered food and medical supplies to Iran, which is subject to stiff US sanctions.
Health workers sprayed villages with disinfectant to try to halt the spread of disease as day time temperatures top 30 degrees Celsius. People were also being vaccinated for tetanus, the provincial governor said.
“We need a pre-fabricated hospital here even with the very minimum facilities because the people taken out of the debris suffer from respiratory problems,” the Hamshahri newspaper quoted one rescue team member as saying.
Most houses in the region are single-storey and made of mud brick. They were pulverised by the force of the quake.
Earthquakes 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.—Reuters
