Quake rattles Afghanistan, killing 600

SAMANGAN, Afghanistan -- An earthquake and aftershocks rocked villages built on mountainsides in northern Afghanistan's remote Hindu Kush range, causing mud-brick houses to crash down on occupants and leaving hundreds buried. About 600 people were killed, an aid official at the scene reported today. The toll, far fewer than the 1,800 initially feared dead by Afghan government officials, was based on assessments by a group of U.N. and other humanitarian agency workers who reached the hardest-hit town of Nahrin on Tuesday, said Eric LeGuin of the French aid group ACTED.

The 5.9-magnitude quake virtually wiped out Nahrin's old city, LeGuin said. And in the adjacent new city of Nahrin, about 50 percent of the houses were destroyed or heavily damaged. In all, about 6,000 homes were destroyed in the Monday night quake and aftershocks.

About 10,000 people lived in the two communities 105 miles north of the capital, Kabul, officials said. Among the buildings destroyed was ACTED's office in the town.

None of the U.S. military personnel at the Bagram air base, about 60 miles from the epicenter, was injured. An army assessment team was on its way to see if American troops could help in rescue efforts, spokesman Maj. Bryan Hilferty said.

As the extent of the disaster slowly became apparent throughout the day Tuesday, a massive emergency assistance effort was launched from two directions to help victims in the remote northeastern province of Baghlan.

Tents, blankets, food, stoves, medicine and at least one mobile clinic were sent to the area over unpaved roads, with officials voicing fear that many people would die from injuries before they could be found and treated.

Aid agencies in Kabul, a 10-hour drive from the south over the high, snow-covered Salang Pass, and the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, a four-hour drive to the west, dispatched truck convoys that were arriving throughout the night Tuesday and early this morning.

But the relief efforts were hampered by aftershocks and by roads still scattered with debris from an earthquake earlier this month.

Kabul radio and television said 5,000 people had been injured in the earthquake and subsequent jolts. More than 12,000 yards of white cloth had been sent to wrap the dead, the television reported. Some reports said that 30,000 people were homeless.

The conflicting reports about the extent of the deaths was understandable in a country without a working telephone network or good road system, where covering even relatively short distances can take hours.

"There are meetings going on to get a rough estimate about the dead and injured," said LeGuin, reached by satellite telephone in Nahrin. "The number we are coming up with is a death toll of 600 persons in the whole district, with 6,000 houses destroyed and that many families left homeless."

The quake hit around 7:30 p.m. Monday and briefly rocked buildings in Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul. Tremors could be felt in Islamabad, Pakistan, nearly 300 miles away. Some aftershocks were as large as 5.0 magnitude.

Interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, who had been scheduled to go to Turkey today, canceled his trip in order to attend to the disaster.

Gen. Khalil, a military commander from nearby Pul-i-Kumri, toured Nahrin on Tuesday afternoon. "We didn't see any houses standing," he reported. The general ordered two military helicopters to ferry out the injured but said dozens more were needed.

Monday's temblor was the second serious earthquake to batter Afghanistan this month. More than 100 people were buried by a quake-triggered landslide in Samangan province on March 3. That quake, the strongest in the region since 1983, was a magnitude 7.2.

At a news briefing in Kabul, Karzai spokesman Yusuf Nuristani said that the prime minister plans to visit the devastated region today. Interior Minister Younis Qanooni and Public Health Minister Suhaila Seddiqi were already at the scene, he said.

Nuristani said the government is allocating $600,000 for immediate emergency assistance, and he pledged $147 to each family of those killed and $88 for families suffering injuries.

"The administration is doing the best it can," he said.

The Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, at the intersection of the Indian and Asian tectonic plates, is one of the most earthquake-prone in the world. In an average year, five earthquakes with a magnitude of 5.0 or stronger strike within 100 miles of the location of Monday's earthquake.

The 7.2-magnitude March 3 quake had an epicenter 150 miles below the surface, so the tremor's energy dissipated before it reached the surface, limiting the destruction. Monday's earthquake was less strong but far deadlier because it struck only about three miles below the surface.

"The energy was closer to the buildings," said Dr. John F. Shroder, a professor of geology at the University of Nebraska.

Based on the pattern of shaking measured on distant seismographs, scientists at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., think the earthquake occurred along a north-south fault but have not identified the fault.

India, once an island to the east of Africa, crashed into the underside of Asia about 45-million years ago, and the two tectonic plates continue to push together at a rate of nearly two inches a year, creating a rugged landscape of high mountains and deep valleys. The crash shattered Earth's crust into a fragmented network of short faults rather than a long fault like the San Andreas Fault in California, where two plates slide past each other.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright