Hundreds feared dead in quake

Hundreds of people have been reported dead and up to 1,000 injured after a powerful earthquake struck the southeast Iranian province of Kerman on Tuesday. "There were no standing buildings, no structures that would give any shelter to any people - survivors of this earthquake," Kari Egge, a representative of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Iran, told IRIN following her visit to Douhan, a village she described as the quake's epicentre. "There were lots of relief workers digging in the rubble trying to find people who were injured or dead. They brought out corpses while we were there," she said. "[As for] the numbers of casualties, the rumours say 400. Of course this can go up or down," Egge said, warning that the figure could rise as some villages further up the mountains remained inaccessible. With bad weather hampering relief operations in the affected areas, a full assessment of the quake's full damage remained unclear as of Tuesday afternoon. "The initial assessment is that 13 villages were affected," Thomas McDermott, UNICEF regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, told IRIN from Kerman, noting that as many as 80,000 people may have been affected. Their comments came after a quake measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale hit the province early on Tuesday morning. The epicentre was close to Zarand city, 70 km east of Kerman, the provincial capital, and approximately 700 km southeast of the capital, Tehran, with the village of Douhan being the worst affected. According to the Iranian Red Crescent Society (IRCS), between 40 to 100 percent of residential homes in the area had been damaged, with 20 homes completely destroyed. "The disaster killed 270 people, and injured at least 1,000 in Zarand city and outlying areas," IRCS said in a statement on Tuesday. Fourteen months ago a devastating earthquake, measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale, levelled the historic city of Bam in the same province, killing over 30,000 people and injuring thousands more. But some media reports suggest that the depth of Tuesday's quake in Zarand was much deeper inside the earth crust than that which hit Bam, resulting in less damage. "The Bam [earthquake] was unusually big, whereas this seems to be a bit more manageable," Roy Probert, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), told IRIN from Geneva. "We know that in some of the cities and the towns, bigger urban areas, the damage was not that great, but in some of the villages it was quite bad," Probert added. Due to its geographical position, Iran is prone to earthquakes and experiences hundreds of small tremors each year. Despite that, building codes, particularly in rural areas, have yet to take account of such risks.