Earthquake Buries 3000 Villagers

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31773, 2 September 1968, Page 13

Earthquake Buries 3000 Villagers

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

TEHERAN (Iran), September 1.

One of the worst earthquakes ever experienced in Eastern Iran yesterday rumbled through more than 100 villages for four minutes, reducing many to rubble and burying at least 3000 persons in the ruins of their homes.

An official Iranian Government announcement says that at least 250 bodies have already been recovered from the debris and that the final death toll will run into thousands. One report puts the number of homeless at more than 100,000.

The Government announcement says the first rescue teams have found several villages reduced to mere piles of rubble.

La'e last night the Shah and Empress of Iran personally took over the administration’ of help to victims.

The area of the disaster is in the far east of Iran, near the Afghanistan and Soviet frontiers. Khav, the village where the epicentre was located, is about 450 miles from Teheran. Information is sketchy because the Iran Government controls all information and has so far released only one official announcement. The most heavily damaged homes are the mud-bricked ones in the small villages, and the catastrophe would have been greater if it had hit the area at night, when most inhabitants are indoors.

A Government source says the earthquake occurred when most of the men were out in the fields and children were playing in the streets. According to early reports, the village of Kakhak was devastated almost instantly. It had about 2000 inhabitants, of whom at least 1400 are dead or injured, according to official reports. The whole village “collapsed within seconds," says a press agency report. Hundreds of children are reported without milk and food, and Government agencies, the Army, gendarmerie

and Imperial Iranian Air Force are rushing food, blankets, tents and medical supplies to the ruined area. The violent earthquake occurred almost six years to the day after the worst in Iran’s history. That one, on September 1, 1962, devastated a 23,000-square-mile area of north-west Iran, killing 12,225 people.

Yesterday’s disaster began about 2 p.m. and lasted for more than four minutes. Press reports quote the Deputy Governor-General of the province of Khorassan as saying that 50 bodies have been recovered in the village of Jarmeh alone.

The epicentre of the earthquake was a sparselypopulated part of the province, which has a population of about 1,800,000.

Reports from the provincial capital of Meshed say hospi tals are packed with injured and that Red Lion and Sun (Iranian Red Cross) teams have set up tented field hospitals to treat hundreds more. The Prime Minister (Mr Amir Abbas Hoveida) today flew to Meshed to inspect the devastated region. As troops and police dug out corpses amid clouds of dust and smoke, thousands of homeless camped in the open waiting for medical teams, food supplies, tents and blankets to be flown into them. Iran, lying across one of

the great fault lines in the earth’s crust, has suffered a series of severe earthquakes in recent years. Last April, at least 60 people were reported killed after tremors in the northeast of the country. And in June, almost all the buildings in the southern town of Lar were destroyed. Elsewhere in Asia, more than 500 people have died this month in earthquakes—in Manila and on an island off the Celebes, in Indonesia.