Thousands Die as a 7.9 Quake Strikes India

By SIMON K.C. LI and JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

Jan. 27, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

NEW DELHI —

India’s mightiest earthquake in half a century tore at the subcontinent’s entire midriff Friday, felling buildings, entombing victims in the rubble of homes and schools, and killing thousands of people.

The Press Trust of India reported that 2,500 people had died in the huge temblor in the country’s west, most of them in the old walled city of Bhuj, near the epicenter. It did not give a source for its figures, but other media gave death toll estimates that ranged from 2,300 to 6,000, with the number of injured estimated at 14,000.

The earthquake, calculated at a magnitude 7.9 by the U.S. Geological Survey, was felt as far as Bangladesh, 1,200 miles away across the Bay of Bengal.

In the capital, New Delhi, 600 miles from the epicenter, high-rises swayed. Office workers in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, India’s other major metropolises, also reported feeling their buildings shudder.

The country’s western neighbor, Pakistan, was lethally shaken as well, with at least eight people reported killed when houses collapsed in the southern province of Sindh.

The first tremors were felt at 8:46 a.m. Republic Day, the annual holiday that marks the 1950 adoption of the Indian Constitution, so many people who might have been at work or commuting were at home. In New Delhi, the grandstands set up for the yearly military parade quivered, but the event went on as planned. Additional celebrations planned for today were canceled.

In Ahmadabad, the sprawling, textile-spinning city of 5 million that is the commercial hub of the worst-hit state, Gujarat, about 80 buildings crumpled to the ground, killing at least 400 people.

“It was like being on a swing. Nobody could get out for those 20 or 30 seconds,” said Vinay Kumar, an employee of Gujarat Petroleum Corp.

Other people in Ahmadabad reported that the shocks lasted 45 seconds, sending panicked residents stampeding outdoors. Survivors besieged the local fire station, frantically demanding help in digging out their loved ones.

“This is an emergency. We are facing a riotous crowd,” Fire Chief Rajesh Bhat told Associated Press. “A fear psychosis is developing in the city. People have fled their homes and are taking refuge in open fields.”

About 70 children and some of their teachers were believed to have been buried alive under the debris of their school in the city. Nineteen engineering students were thought to be entombed in a college that collapsed.

The Nehru Bridge across the Sabarmatki River in Ahmadabad had developed cracks. Traffic was stopped, but officials said they didn’t think that the bridge was in danger of collapsing.

As night fell on Ahmadabad, thousands of people huddled on sidewalks without shelter, warming themselves with bonfires as temperatures dropped to the mid-40s. Rescue workers laboring under the harsh beams of searchlights clawed with bare hands at the rubble, seeking both survivors and the dead.

Rescuers hauled victims in blood-soaked clothing from the ruins of buildings in the textile city, known as the “Manchester of the East” in British colonial times. Firefighters worked with chain saws and drills. As a bulldozer toiled to clear away mangled masonry and twisted metal, people stood by, mute and dazed.

Hospitals in the city overflowed by afternoon, with some of the injured, who suffered broken limbs and flesh wounds, screaming and wailing. Television footage showed doctors performing operations in the streets. According to the Press Trust of India, 70 people died while awaiting treatment. At N.S. Hospital, the veranda was stacked with corpses.

In Bhuj, a desert town of 150,000 near the Pakistani border, aerial photographs showed that 10% of the buildings had been destroyed and all others damaged, officials said. The quake severed the town’s communications with the outside world, and officials worried that the loss of life there would prove tremendous.

Electricity was restored to most of Gujarat state shortly after the quake but remained severed in Bhuj. The air force used kerosene lamps to light the runway at the Bhuj airport for emergency aid flights.

“Bhuj is the worst affected. I expect the toll to be very high in Bhuj,” said Haren Pandya, the home minister in Gujarat.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee held an emergency Cabinet meeting and urged rescue workers to go on a war footing to deal with the consequences of the powerful quake. Declaring a state of emergency in Gujarat, he called on his 1 billion fellow citizens “to rally together at this time of national calamity.” Five battalions of soldiers were dispatched to join the rescue operation.

Indian Home Minister L.K. Advani, who toured some of the devastated areas of Gujarat, said authorities were airlifting 10,000 tents, 10,000 tons of grain, 20 doctors and surgeons, and communications and seismology experts to the state.

India’s government made no immediate request for international assistance, although some foreign leaders, including President Bush, promptly offered aid.

Three times in the past decade, earthquakes greater than magnitude 6 have rocked population centers in northern and central India, which is one of the world’s most seismically active regions. In 1993, more than 10,000 people were killed when a magnitude 6 quake struck Maharashtra state.

Friday’s 7.9 quake was the region’s most intense since 1950, when a magnitude 8.6 temblor struck India, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Earthquake Information Center.

The 1950 quake was one of the most powerful of the past 100 years, surpassed only by half a dozen mammoth temblors of magnitude 9 or greater in Alaska, Russia, Ecuador and Chile.

The magnitude 7.9 earthquake was about 64 times more powerful than the Northridge quake that rocked Southern California in 1994.

As a matter of geology, the earthquake Friday was a byproduct of the titanic energies generated by the slow-motion collision of India into Asia, which began more than 50 million years ago and was responsible for creating the lofty Himalayas.

Unlike California’s San Andreas fault, where earthquakes are a consequence of the energy generated by vast tectonic plates sliding past each other, the tectonic plates at the intersection of India and Asia have hit head-on. As a result, the Earth’s crust there has buckled and been pushed upward, with the movement unleashing a series of earthquakes.

India’s Meteorological Department said the quake’s epicenter was 13 miles northeast of Bhuj, in the sparsely populated Rann of Kutch, on the border with Pakistan.

The economic consequences of the quake may prove enormous. Gujarat, the native state of revered Indian patriot Mohandas K. Gandhi, is a center of Indian agriculture and textile and chemical manufacturing.

“The whole state has been affected. Communications have been disrupted all over the state,” said Pandya, the state official.

Government spokesman Pramod Mahajan, citing a preliminary measurement from the Indian Meteorological Institute, put the strength of Friday’s quake at 6.9. The U.S. Geological Survey, which averaged seismographic readings from around the world, said it was 7.9.

The massive jolt was also felt by participants in the world’s largest religious festival, in Allahabad 1,000 miles from Bhuj. There, millions of Hindus taking part in a ritual dip in the Ganges felt the riverbank sway under them, news reports said.

North of Gujarat, in the desert state of Rajasthan, a popular destination for Western tourists, the yellow-stone fort of Jaisalmer also was reportedly damaged, with walls fissuring and some stones holding the gate tumbling to the ground.

Li reported from New Delhi and Dahlburg from Paris. Times staff writer Robert Lee Hotz in Los Angeles, Siddartha Barua in The Times’ New Delhi Bureau and Times wire services contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Indian Temblor

An estimated 2,500 people were killed in Friday’s earthquake, which occurred near the boundaries of several tectonic plates. The 7.9 quake was felt in Bombay and New Delhi, and as far as neighboring Pakistan and parts of Nepal.

The strain that caused the earthquake was due to the Indian plate pushing northward into the Eurasian plate.

Bhuj: Quake’s epicenter

Seismic Toll

* Jan. 26, 2001: An estimated 2,500 killed in magnitude 7.9 quake in western India’s Gujarat state.

* April 23, 1999: More than 110 killed in a magnitude 6.8 quake in Chamoli in northeastern India’s Uttar Pradesh state.

* May 22, 1997: A magnitude 6 earthquake kills 43 and injures 1,000 in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh state in central India.

* Sept. 30, 1993: More than 10,000 killed and thousands injured in Latur in the central state of Maharashtra in a magnitude 6 quake.

* Oct. 19, 1991: About 2,000 killed in northern India in a magnitude 7 quake.

* Aug. 20, 1988: More than 1,450 killed in the northeastern state of Bihar in a quake measuring 6.6.

* Aug. 15, 1950: About 1,538 people killed in the northeastern Assam state in a magnitude 8.6 earthquake.

Sources: Associated Press; U.S. Geological Survey

How to Help