20,000 Feared Dead In Iran Quake

[taylormemer]

Preliminary estimates so far put the death toll at about 20,000.

The quake was centered near the ancient city of Bam about 610 miles (975 km) southeast of the capital, Tehran. Bam has a population of about 80,000 people.

"The situation in Bam is worrying. The scale of the damage and deaths is widespread and the number of victims is high," Mohammad Ali Karimi, the governor general of Kerman province, told Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

He said 60 percent of the city's residential areas have been destroyed.

The quake struck at 5:27 a.m. Friday (8:57 p.m. ET Thursday) as people were sleeping.

"The historic quarter of the city has been completely destroyed and caused great human loss," Nour Bakhsh with Iran's Red Crescent relief agency told IRNA.

A legislator for Kerman province, Hasan Khoshrou, told The Associated Press people on the scene said the devastation was "beyond imagination."

Adding to the crisis, both of the hospitals in Bam were destroyed in the earthquake, forcing people to seek medical attention in the provincial capital of Kerman. Private vehicles have been banned from the roads to make room for emergency traffic.

"We have no exact information about the scale of the damage since all telephone communications with the cities of Bam, Jiroft and Kohnouj had been cut off," Karimi said.

Mostafa Mohaghegh, another Red Crescent official, told CNN that rescuers were busy providing food, shelter and medicine to those injured in the quake.

"The state of the damages is very wide in the city so we are yet to identify the total number of those who have died and also the injured."



In explaining the severity of the damage to the city, journalist Shirzad Bozorgmehr in Tehran said Bam is an ancient city not designed to withstand a major earthquake. He said army search and rescue teams have been mobilized to the area.

Tehran University's Geophysics Institute said the earthquake measured a magnitude of 6.3, according to IRNA. It was followed by several aftershocks, including one measuring 5.3.

For its part, the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center measured the magnitude of the quake at 6.7