A Quake Rescue From Afar

When the Earth moved and more than 40,000 Iranians died in Bam, on the other side of the world, the rumblings quickly reached Orange County. It’d be fair to say that life for Hasan Nouri and Sudabeh Shoja hasn’t been the same since.

On the surface, both live normal lives. Nouri owns an environmental engineering firm in Laguna Hills and Shoja is construction manager for the city of Huntington Beach. Iran is a long, long way away -- unless, as for these two, humanitarian relief is part of your life.

And so, when Nouri got a phone call from a friend two months ago asking if he would offer his engineering expertise to help the ancient city cope with the devastating earthquake, Nouri had a reflex response: Yes, he’d make some calls.

One of them went to Shoja, an Iranian American structural engineer accustomed to helping her professional peers in California when the talk turns to earthquakes. But the call from Nouri was different: This was a town in the country of her birth that had been leveled.

“It always hurts more, doesn’t it?” she replies when I ask if she felt the suffering more acutely because it came from deep in her roots.

Like Nouri, Shoja went to her Rolodex and assembled a team of seismic experts. Eventually, five such experts spent two weeks in Bam and came back with list of critical projects, including upgrading building codes and tackling infrastructure needs. Last week, they reported back to Shoja and others at a meeting in Irvine. Aside from the obvious quake damage, the team warned that the next crisis will be the loss of date and citrus farms fed with water by canals that have since collapsed.

“They have to respond fast,” Shoja says of international relief efforts. Fierce seasonal winds also will threaten the tents housing thousands of homeless residents, she says, putting a premium on building prefabricated housing.

Shoja says local builders also need help making homes more earthquake-resistant and establishing uniform codes, like in the United States.

“It’s very sad, and it just makes me appreciate all the codes and enforcement we have over here,” Shoja says. “We had a similar earthquake in a similar range in San Luis Obispo County and only lost [two people]. Even that is too many, yet four days later, an earthquake hits [in Bam] and kills 43,000.”

While Shoja marshaled her troops in Orange County, Nouri went to Washington, D.C., about 10 days ago to mobilize what he called “the engineering community across the nation.” The mission was to find out what the constraints on the engineers might be because of the tension between Washington and Tehran. Nouri learned there were some, such as the need to secure a State Department license before setting up something as seemingly innocuous as a videoconference between seismic engineers in the United States and Iran. He’s doing that now.

Whoever invented the phrase “walking the walk” had people like Shoja and Nouri in mind. Among other things, they’ve worked internationally on behalf of orphans.

Nouri says his humanitarian work, reaching as far as Southeast Asia and Africa, stems from values instilled by his well-to-do family in Afghanistan.

And now that he’s in the United States, he says, “whenever there’s a disaster somewhere in the world, regardless of where it is, we, as Americans, who are blessed with fortune, it is our job to extend our arm of assistance.”

Which we do.

Still, most of us don’t think to compare Richter Scale numbers and the relative casualties of places as different as Bam, Iran and San Luis Obispo County.

Shoja can’t help but do so. And when the numbers come back 43,000 compared to two, there’s nothing to do but state the obvious.

“It’s two different worlds, that’s for sure,” she says.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays

and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.