5.9 Quake Kills 370, Injures 3,000 in Egypt : Disaster: Temblor sets off pandemonium in Cairo, 20 miles from epicenter. It’s felt as far away as Jerusalem.

One of the most powerful earthquakes in Egypt’s modern history plunged this teeming capital into panic Monday, collapsing buildings and tumbling huge mosque minarets. At least 370 people were killed and more than 3,000 others injured, authorities said.

The destructive temblor, with a 5.9 magnitude, rocked Cairo shortly after 3 p.m., at the height of midday traffic. It caused bloody traffic pileups and gridlocked the city’s already crowded thoroughfares for much of the afternoon.

Frightened residents threw themselves from balconies as the city’s massive concrete high-rises began to sway. Thousands rushed into the streets and into nearby mosques as clouds of dust and the dull boom of stretching joists and tumbling concrete rose over the city.

Many people were killed when they threw themselves from windows or were caught in stampedes as this city of 12 million, unaccustomed to quakes, rolled under a major temblor centered just 20 miles southwest of the capital.

There were no immediate reports of damage to Egypt’s famed Pharaonic monuments, the Pyramids and the Sphinx. But the official Middle East News Agency said there was significant damage to an unidentified ancient mosque in Cairo.

In Southern California, seismologists and state officials noted that the Egyptian quake matched the 5.9 magnitude Whittier Narrows temblor of Oct. 1, 1987; the Egyptian quake’s epicenter was about the same distance from the center of metropolitan Cairo as the Whittier Narrows temblor was from downtown Los Angeles.

But the fatal toll from Whittier Narrows quake, which caused damage estimated at $368 million, was just eight--three people struck by objects; five dead from heart attacks or indirect effects. The toll was lower because of stringent building rules and safety practices in effect in Southern California, an area prone to many more quakes than Cairo, officials said.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, visiting Beijing, announced he would cut short his Asia tour and return home. Offers of support and assistance came from Saudi Arabia and the country with which Egypt made peace in 1979, Israel. Shocks from the quake were felt as far away as Jerusalem, 250 miles northeast of Cairo.

“We all started saying Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! (God is great!),” said a man who rushed from the 10th floor of the undamaged state television building. “We were saying farewell to the world, we all knew we were dying. I was saying to God, ‘Take me fast.’ ”

More than 116 buildings were seriously damaged or collapsed, casualties of a city whose ancient neighborhoods hold tight clusters of crowded tenements and whose modern districts have been plagued with illegal high-rises that often fall of their own accord.

Of the death and damage toll, Egyptian Prime Minister Atef Sedki observed, “These are the figures we have so far . . . (but) God only knows.”

The worst damage appeared to be in the well-heeled suburb of Heliopolis, where a 14-story apartment building was reduced to a pile of stones and twisted steel. Neighbors pulled 15 survivors from the wreckage, and bulldozers worked through the night in search of victims as dazed residents watched and held their heads in their hands.

Some workers began plowing through the rubble with their bare hands after they heard voices under the remains of about 75 apartments. Almost 15 hours after the quake, a bulldozer operator spotted a woman waving. He eventually hauled her--clinging tearfully to her 2-year-old son--alive from the rubble.

In the old Helmiya district--the grand neighborhood of Ottoman pashas that now teems with tiny alleys and narrow, squalid apartment buildings--at least four buildings collapsed. A shattered four-story apartment building stood with chairs and blankets dangling crazily from the remaining beams; there was furniture smashed amid the rubble below.

“My mother was in there,” said a man who gave his name as Sayid. Tears streamed down his face as he stood at the edge of the ruin. “It was nothing but dust and stones. We pulled the people we could out, but we don’t know how many are still in there. We pulled out three. One of them was dead.”

In the Dokki district, the top half of a large minaret plunged into the auditorium of the mosque below, sending dazed, dust-covered worshipers into the streets screaming Allahu akbar! Another minaret fell near the old El Sakayeen Alley, made famous in a novel by the Nobel prize-winning Egyptian novelist, Naguib Mahfouz.

Central Cairo’s Qasr al Aini Hospital, the largest such public facility in the capital, was a surreal scene of pandemonium Monday night. Helmeted riot police held back dozens of wailing relatives who sought to aid the overburdened staff by wheeling injured relatives on stretchers along a blood-dabbled corridor.

“It’s a disaster,” said an emergency room physician whose clothes were drenched in sweat. “To get an accurate assessment will take not less than two or three weeks. There are not less than 500 injured here, ranging from broken bones to neurosurgery.”

Men screamed and banged on an elevator door at the end of a corridor as stretchers lined up for a lift. An X-ray machine was hauled into a hall; the injured hobbled to it, then lay on the floor under it to get X-rays taken.

In that same hall, a young girl in a school uniform, trapped under a wall when her school collapsed in the Maadi district south of Cairo, rested in a daze as her bloody head was examined; a woman, her head wrapped in blood-drenched gauze, wandered through the melee.

“Most of them have jumped from their windows,” the emergency room physician said of the victims. “Some of them crashed in their cars, some of them were trampled in the crowds or had broken glass in their legs.”

A young man walked up to him, dropped another young man at the doctor’s feet and waved an X-ray, screaming in Arabic.

“No time!” the doctor shouted; the man, also shouting, picked up the wounded youth and disappeared.

“When the earthquake started, everybody was excited, everybody was running. I started running, too, but the others caught up with me and I got trampled,” said Ahmad, 28, who waited in a wheelchair for a leg exam.

Authorities said that up to 100 children were fatally trampled when panicked residents fled from buildings. A stair railing collapsed at a school in the Shoubra district, injuring many in the building; an employee of the state pension department was killed when he fell from a fifth-floor balcony at central Cairo’s Lazoughly Square.

“I felt the house was going to fall, so I jumped from the second floor,” said a glum-faced man lying with a broken leg at Shoubra Public Hospital. “I fell on my foot; the house is safe. Nothing happened to the house.”

In an old alley near the Lazoughly vegetable market, the front half of a house collapsed into a pile of stones. But Zaynab Mustapha Abdelaziz, who lives there with her son and six daughters, planned to rebuild and stay. “Our family is large, and we can’t afford to be on the street,” she said.

A few blocks away, a dozen women huddled at the door of a mosque. “The building we live in moved, and we’re worried,” said a woman named Samiha. “So we’re sitting here waiting. We’re sitting next to the house of God. If there was one safe place, this would be it.”

There were reports of scattered power outages and downed telephone lines throughout the city, but no major fires were reported.

As for concern about Egypt’s historic treasures, officials noted that they have suffered damage through the ages from quakes; the famed lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, was reportedly toppled by a temblor in the past.

But damaging quakes in the modern era have been relatively rare. A 4.1 magnitude quake shook northern Egypt in May but caused no serious damage or injuries.

The last quake approaching the power of Monday’s temblor occurred in 1981, when a 5.6 magnitude quake hit south of the Aswan High Dam on the southern Nile, which holds behind it one of the world’s largest man-made lakes.

David W. Simpson--president of the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington and an expert in Middle East seismology--said it was fortunate that the quake occurred to the west of Cairo. That area, on the Nile’s west side, traditionally is a zone of little development.

“The ancient Egyptians believed the east side of the river represented a zone of life, where the sun rose in the morning, and the west side a zone of death,” he noted. “All the tombs were put on the west side of the river, and to this day most of the development is on the east side.”

Historically there have been few quakes in the immediate Cairo area, Simpson explained, and there are no seismic construction codes in force there.

Egypt’s Earthquake

The earthquake that hit Egypt was centered about 20 miles southwest of densely populated Cairo, the strongest on record in the area:

Toll: More than 300 people killed and more than 3,000 injured in nine provinces. More than 116 buildings destroyed or badly damaged.

Pyramids: Officials said the pyramids, the Sphinx and other ancient monuments apparently escaped damage.

Quake area: Tremors were felt as far away as Jerusalem, 250 miles northeast of Cairo.

Flood danger: The quake spared Aswan High Dam, about 400 miles upriver from the capital, which holds back one of the world’s largest man-made lakes, 310-mile-long Lake Nasser. Any serious breach of the dam would send a huge wall of water--an estimated 110 billion gallons--roaring through the Nile River valley, where almost all Egypt’s 55 million people live.

Times staff writer Kenneth Reich in Los Angeles contributed to this report.