Iran Quake Rescuers on Verge of Giving Up

Rescue workers moved like sleepwalkers through a broken city. Bodies were sprawled on every corner. The sickly stench of death choked the streets.

Three grueling days after a fierce earthquake rattled the old Silk Road trading center of Bam, heavy-hearted rescue workers began to give up their hunt for survivors even as teams of foreign rescuers streamed into Iran.

In the wind-scraped fields of flattened buildings, ash and dust, the hope of salvaging human life had all but flickered out by Sunday night.

The fresh panic of disaster gave way to weary chaos. A hulking bulldozer ate holes into the dirt for a mass grave. As an imam chanted verses from the Koran, the dead were laid down with a shower of dirt.

Most of the bodies were barefoot, as these quiet neighborhoods were cloaked in sleep when the earthquake struck Friday morning. Iranian officials have been unable to count the dead, but on Sunday said well over 20,000 people were killed. About 30,000 more were injured, and an estimated 100,000 lost their homes and were left to forage for blankets in the bitter winter nights.

Sunday night, the ride into Bam with relief workers provided eerie scenes under a moonless sky. From 10 miles outside the flattened town, darkness was punctuated by roadside campfires and rows of tents occupied by the newly homeless.

Almost no building was spared. Many of the houses were built of sun-baked brick and mud, and collapsed in heaps. More modern buildings split apart as if carved in two by a large knife.

Some of the homeless slept under blankets along the streets of Bam, which had been a thriving date-growing center. The date palms remained erect on streets otherwise lined only with rubble.

At 3 a.m. today, Kobra Abasi Nejad, 53, joined the early morning parade of the shocked and grief-stricken. Nejad recounted how four of her six children died when the ceiling of the family home collapsed in their shared bedroom.

Her husband, Abasa Joshai, 53, suffered a head injury from the falling debris.

“We wish we were killed, not them. They were young.... We wish we were killed, not them,” he said.

The airport in Bam was congested with aircraft carrying relief crews and emergency supplies such as bottled water. The terminal building was badly cracked and littered with heaps of debris from the fallen ceiling.

“We have not lost hope for survivors,” Interior Minister Abdul Vahed Musavi-Lari said Sunday. “Our priority remains to find them.”

But among bone-tired rescuers, pragmatism began to set in. A team of Swiss animal trainers decided Sunday there was no use in picking through the rubble anymore, and headed for home, sniffer dogs in tow. There was nobody to rescue, they said.

“The city was 90% destroyed,” Roland Schlachter, the head of Switzerland’s relief operation, told Swiss radio. “The people were crushed, suffocated or frozen in the rubble of their mud-brick homes.”

Disaster victims often stay alive for 72 hours trapped in debris -- so long as they can breathe. But the distinctive mud bricks used by the people of this southeastern desert town to build their houses left little air when they crumbled. The earthen walls melted into chalky debris as thin as baby powder, with few gaps for breathing holes.

“We are not quite out of time yet, but time is very short,” Barry Sessions of Britain’s Rapid-UK rescue team told Associated Press. By Sunday, his group had been hunting for 24 hours and hadn’t turned up a single live person.

“There are few voids or gaps left in the buildings where we would normally find survivors,” he said.

Exhausted and heartsick, the people of Bam wept bitterly alongside mass graves. Imams stripped off their robes to wrap the dead in sheets. Frantic to recover the bodies of their kin, survivors begged rescue workers to use their dogs to root out the corpses. The aid workers were hesitant; the dogs are trained to hunt for life, they said.

A grieving mother crawled into a mass grave after her 3-month-old infant.

“I do not want to leave my family,” she cried. “I have nobody left.”

Huddled in her chador, 19-year-old Hakimeh Bahrami crouched in the rubble, crying. She was the only survivor from her family; her mother, father, sister and two brothers died in the quake, the Iranian newspaper Yas-e-no reported.

“Step gently,” she wept, pointing to a mound of bricks. “My brothers are sleeping here.”

A couple had managed to push their baby through the rubble to air -- only to die themselves under the crush of their devastated home.

“Everyone is doing their best to help, but the disaster is so huge,” President Mohammad Khatami said. “I believe no matter how much is done we cannot meet the people’s expectations.”

In 1990, when a magnitude 7.7 quake killed 40,000 people, Iranian officials rejected offers of international aid. This time, they took all comers, with the single exception of Israel.

Relief was beginning to pour into Bam, choking the roads with traffic. Aid workers came from Austria, Azerbaijan and Finland; from Germany, Russia and Turkey.

They came to fish out survivors, only to be met with long hours of disappointment.

Amid the heartbreak, the first U.S. plane to land in Iran in more than two decades touched down in Kerman early Sunday. American airmen and Iranian soldiers worked side by side to unload aid from the U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules.

The United States cut diplomatic ties with Iran after the Islamic Revolution. Nevertheless, President Bush, who named Iran -- along with Iraq and North Korea -- as being in an “axis of evil,” sent his sympathies. The U.S. State Department put together a relief package, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage held telephone talks over the weekend with Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Mohammed Javad Zarif.

In Bam, bottled water was nowhere to be found, and armed thugs looted wrecked shops and snatched aid from the needy. Young men chased aid trucks, snatching blankets as soon as volunteers dropped them to the ground.

Looters tried to steal food from damaged shops, motorbikes from a police lot and blankets from a relief warehouse.

“There is no organization,” resident Mehdi Dehghani said. “Whoever is stronger takes the aid.”

Huddled in the date groves outside town, survivors burned scraps of cardboard to keep warm. They had nothing.

The Iranian government began to issue new birth certificates, because the old ones were swallowed by the wreckage.

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Times staff writer Ellingwood reported from Bam and special correspondent Anvari from Tehran.