Afghan Earthquake Triggers Landslide, Burying a Village

At least 60 people were reported dead and 100 were missing Monday after a landslide touched off by an earthquake sent tons of rock down on a village tucked in a narrow gorge in northern Afghanistan.

Virtually the entire village of Darun-i-Zao, which had 60 to 100 homes, was buried beneath more than 50 feet of chalky rock that plugged a 200-yard-wide gorge and dammed the Samangan River.

The slide occurred during a magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck central Afghanistan on Sunday, shaking a region that stretched from Tajikistan to India, and causing several deaths in the capital, Kabul, and other Afghan cities.

With the river dammed by the landslide, a lake of rising water inundated an estimated 300 more homes and spread over about 10 acres, sending more than 1,000 residents of two other villages upstream racing for higher ground.

Officials in Samangan, a city of about 70,000 people about 25 miles northwest of the disaster site, said they feared a breach in the debris would send water roaring through several villages downstream and also threaten the city.

The mammoth slide left an eerie scene in the neighboring village of Pas-i-Hisar. Several inches of dust covered streets, houses, rock walls and trees there like fresh snow. Survivors held scarves across their faces, and some suffered nosebleeds from the suffocating pall.

Abdul Halim, 36, led a line of about 35 men who crossed a narrow causeway beside the floodwaters and headed downstream to safety. “There were many houses in this area,” he said from a heap of rock plugging the canyon. “We are 50 meters [about 165 feet] above them now. There were 70 houses. Only eight people escaped.”

It was apparent that an official count of the dead and missing would take a while. Emergency crews arrived Monday afternoon. They administered first aid to about seven injured people but evacuated only a few scattered residents. The rest apparently chose to move farther upstream to other villages.

Afghan Red Crescent rescuers said they estimated at least 60 dead and 100 missing as a result of the landslide, said Dr. Mohammed Saleh, director of the Red Crescent clinic in Samangan city, the capital of Samangan province. Associated Press said that relief workers from the U.N.’s World Food Program also reached the region and that they had put the death toll at 100.

Villagers Watched as Gorge Collapsed

Villagers said they were startled by violent shaking followed by a thunderous roar shortly after 4:30 p.m. Sunday, and looked up to see the sheer wall of the gorge collapse to the canyon floor, Halim said.

“It was a huge sound,” he said. “The women and children were frightened to death.”

As he spoke, loud cracking noises could be heard from the fractured rock face, where chunks of unstable rock crashed down, kicking up plumes of white powder. Behind Halim, a pale green lake had risen to the roofs of the mud-brick houses.

Water had backed up into the gorge for a quarter-mile and was still rising Monday. Below the newly formed dam, a river that once ran three to five feet deep was reduced to a trickle. Villagers continued to collect and use the water, apparently unaware of the potential danger.

No evacuation orders had been issued, but government officials dispatched engineers to assess the debris dam’s stability, according to Khadam Hussain Natiqi, deputy governor of the province.

Natiqi estimated that 3,000 residents were affected by the slide.

A World Food Program-hired team was heading to the Salang Tunnel linking Afghanistan’s north and south to clear a quake-triggered slide that was reported to have at least partially blocked the route, the food program’s spokeswoman Jennifer Abrahamson said in Kabul.

U.N. and Red Cross teams were en route to the north Monday to assess damage, said Nigel Fisher, the deputy special envoy for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Two C-130 cargo planes loaded with food and items such as blankets and medicine are on standby in Dushanbe, the Tajik capital, if needed to provide emergency relief, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said in New York.

The United Nations is also in contact with the Halo Trust, part of the U.N. Mine Action Program for Afghanistan, to obtain information on possible mine sites in the earthquake-affected area, he said.

Quake’s Epicenter Was 120 Miles Deep

At the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., Director Waverly Person said the Afghan earthquake was centered about 120 miles underneath the surface.

“This was the kind of deep quake that is common in that region,” Person said. “So strong a quake occurring at a shallow level would have caused far more deaths and destruction.” By contrast, California’s magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake in 1994 was about 12 miles deep.

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