Survivors Found, but Quake Death Toll Mounts in Iran

With their bare hands, frantic rescue workers clawed at the rubble of flattened buildings in hopes of finding survivors of Friday’s devastating earthquake, which authorities said might have killed as many as 40,000 people.

About 150 survivors were dug out of the rubble Saturday, including a baby. By evening, rescuers were running out of time. In the ruined, ancient city of Bam, thousands of people were still missing as another frigid night fell. Workers lacked equipment and search dogs to sort through the debris. There wasn’t enough medicine to treat the injured, and no room left for the dead in Bam’s cemeteries.

“We need help,” Brig. Mohammadi, army commander in southeast Iran, told state television. “Otherwise we will be pulling corpses, not the injured, out of the rubble.”

It was difficult to ascertain the death toll. About 20,000 may have died in and around Bam, Iranian officials said. Other officials said that twice that many might have been killed. Bodies were trapped in fields of ruins, isolated by damaged roads and lost in the remains of mud-brick houses.

“As more bodies are pulled out, we fear that the death toll may reach as high as 40,000,” said Akbar Alavi, the mayor of Kerman, the provincial capital. “An unbelievable human disaster has occurred.”

At least one American was killed when the temblor struck in southeastern Iran before daybreak Friday. A wounded American was being treated in a Tehran hospital, the State Department announced Saturday. Both were visiting Bam’s centuries-old mud-brick citadel, which was heavily damaged by the quake. The names of the Americans were not released.

The earthquake struck near Bam, an ancient Silk Road trading post 600 miles southeast of Tehran, when most of its 80,000 residents were still asleep. Iranians registered the magnitude at 6.3; the U.S. Geological Survey measured 6.5.

Sliced by several fault lines, Iran is prone to large earthquakes that can wreak disaster in places such as Bam, where many of the buildings are made of mud brick. In 1990, an earthquake in northwest Iran, the worst recorded disaster in the nation’s history, killed 40,000 people, mostly in Gilan and Zanjan provinces.

Survivors of the latest quake were evacuated by helicopter to other Iranian cities or taken to Bam airport, which served as a makeshift medical clinic.

The government was struggling to find enough tents to shelter thousands of survivors whose homes were destroyed.

Townspeople dug broad trenches to bury the corpses. If the identities of the dead were a mystery, workers snapped photographs of the corpses before burying them. The stench of death was beginning to rise in the streets of Bam.

Frantic for aid, Iranian officials lifted visa requirements for emergency workers and said they would gladly accept money, medicine and other help from any nation willing to contribute -- except from the “Zionist regime” of Israel, which the Islamic nation considers a bitter enemy.

“We greatly welcome any assistance from the United States,” with which Iran does not have diplomatic relations, Alavi said. “We welcome assistance from all countries except Israel.”

Despite the 24-year-old diplomatic freeze that began with Iran’s Islamic revolution, the White House on Saturday announced the deployment to Bam of more than 200 civilian and federal rescuers, including a team from Los Angeles. The teams include experts in urban search and rescue, emergency surgery and disaster response coordination, with firefighters and medical workers from Boston and Fairfax County, Va., as well as Los Angeles.

The U.S. also will send more than 150,000 pounds of medical supplies from military bases in Kuwait, the White House said.

“The United States will continue to work with Iranian authorities and international relief organizations to help the people of Iran during this challenging time,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross appealed for $12.3 million to aid the disaster area, where an estimated 50,000 people were left homeless.

Medical supplies, food and rescue teams began to pour into Iran from around the world Saturday. The United Nations, European Union countries, Russia, China, Japan, Turkey and others sent workers and supplies -- but they couldn’t come fast enough. In a single hour, on a single street, rescue workers pulled out 200 bodies.

A weary rescue worker named Omid Alipour said his team had found only three survivors Friday night. “We don’t have anything, just our bare hands,” he told Reuters news service.

Aftershocks continued to rattle Bam on Saturday. A temblor that registered a magnitude of 5.3 raised fresh fears among traumatized survivors.

“There is not a standing building in the city,” Interior Minister Abdul Vahed Musavi-Lari said. “Bam has turned into a wasteland. Even if a few buildings are standing, you cannot trust to live in them.”

Musavi-Lari was addressing a news conference when a man in the crowd interrupted in desperation, Associated Press reported.

“My father is under the rubble,” he told Musavi-Lari. “I’ve been asking for help since yesterday, but nobody has come to help me. Please help me. I want my father alive.”

The extent of the destruction was only beginning to be known. The roads leading to the outlying villages were too heavily damaged to travel, so rescue workers reportedly walked to reach some areas. More than 100,000 people live in the countryside near Bam; their fate was unknown.

“Everyone is under the rubble, all the people are dead. Why no one comes to help us?” a man in the streets of Bam yelled at reporters Saturday.

As night came to Bam, the darkness was filled with moans, witnesses said. “I was hearing the moans of people under the rubble, and I knew that each second would mean life or death for them,” said Arash, a 24-year-old civil engineering student who rushed home to Bam from his university in Kerman to help. “So I hated myself like never before. Why I could not bring them out on my own?”

The remains of the ancient citadel and city of Arg-e-Bam also were mostly destroyed, state television reported. Stretching just outside Bam proper, the 2.3-square-mile Sassanian city was built of mud, clay, straw and palm tree trunks, much of it in the 16th century and earlier.

With many bodies still pinned beneath the wrecked buildings throughout Bam, health officials began to worry that disease would begin to spread through the area. Rescuers were urged to don rubber gloves and face masks to protect themselves.

A prison outside Bam was crushed, killing some inmates and freeing hundreds of others. Some officials worried aloud about looting, but others told Reuters that the inmates probably were preoccupied with finding their families.

Times staff writer Edwin Chen in Crawford, Texas, and special correspondents Lily Sadeghi in Tehran and Amberin Zaman in Ankara, Turkey, contributed to this report.