A powerful earthquake devastated 200 villages in the remote mountains of northeastern Iran on Saturday, killing at least 2,000 people and injuring 5,000. Survivors frantically pulled victims from collapsed buildings and rushed them to makeshift emergency centers.
Iran appealed for international aid for the stricken villages and towns, many of them cut off by landslides triggered by the quake. Iranian volunteers hurried to the region to help dig out the dead and injured, state-run radio said.The earthquake struck at 12:28 p.m. with a moment magnitude of 7.1, according to the U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo. It was centered 65 miles north-northeast of Birjand, near the town of Qaen, about 70 miles west of the Afghan border.
Most of the damage occurred in the 60-mile stretch between Birjand and Qaen, a region dotted by poor villages and mud huts. The official Islamic Republic News Agency said there was considerable damage in Afghanistan but gave no other details.
"I was outside when I heard the mountain roar like a dragon, and suddenly the air became dark as night from the thick cloud of dust," said survivor Gholamreza Nowrouz-Zadeh.
More than 100 children, including all six of his grandchildren, were killed when the schoolhouse collapsed in his village of Ardakul, about 60 miles east of Qaen, he said crying.
Dr. Mohammad Hossein Mozaffar said more physicians were urgently needed.
"I can't deal with this alone," he said as he put a cast on the leg of a wailing 5-year-old boy clinging to his mother.
"I don't know how many casts I have done today, but it seems like hundreds," Mozaffar said, pointing to piles of empty boxes of casting chalk around him.
The radio broadcast a desperate appeal for surgical teams, medical supplies, tents, food, water tankers and ambulances. It said water and power lines to the stricken villages had been severed.
On Saturday night, many people in Qaen slept in the streets, shivering in the 41-degree air, but too scared to go indoors because of their fear of further quakes.
Tehran radio said some 200 villages were either destroyed or severely damaged. It said 400 relief teams were dispatched to the area, home to about 40,000 people.
Most of the villagers in the region are subsistence farmers who either tend camels or sheep or grow wheat and saffron. Many of the injured looked weak and malnourished.
It was the strongest earthquake to strike the earthquake-prone nation since two powerful temblors hit northwestern Gilan and Zanjan provinces on June 21, 1990. About 50,000 people were killed and 60,000 injured in the quakes, which had magnitudes of 7.3 and 7.7.