Hope for Survivors Fades

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BAM, Iran, 29 December 2003 — Rescue workers from around the world joined Iranians yesterday in searching the earthquake-pulverized rubble of this city whose mud-brick houses became instant tombs for thousands of their inhabitants.

The interior minister said more than 15,000 bodies have been retrieved, and the provincial governor’s office said the death toll in Bam alone stood at 22,000. The town had a pre-quake population of 80,000.

As the sharp, foul smell of decaying bodies rose from the ruins and blew with the dust on warming winds, hope of finding survivors faded.

But not the efforts. At least 45 planes from other countries landed in Iran Saturday and yesterday, bringing foreign rescue teams, search dogs, medical teams and supplies. US military C-130 cargo planes were among them, despite the long-severed diplomatic relations and US President George W. Bush’s characterization of Iran as part of “the axis of evil.”

“We have not lost hope for survivors, and our priority remains to find them,” Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi Lari vowed. An Interior Ministry spokesman later said the search for survivors would go on until rescue teams were certain they can find no more victims alive.

The state IRNA news agency reported that some 1,000 people had been pulled alive from the ruins. Those rescued were located thanks to the “sniffer dogs and hi-tech ultrasound equipment of both Iranian and foreign emergency teams”, the news agency said.

“Up to 15,000 bodies have been recovered and buried,” Lari told reporters in Bam.

Cemeteries overflowed with corpses. Clerics in shirt-sleeves rather than their usual flowing robes and wearing face-masks against the dust and smell tore sheeting to shroud corpses.

With no time to wash them according to Islamic practice, bodies brought in blankets from wrecked buildings were sprayed with disinfectant to try to guard against disease and tipped into trenches hollowed out by mechanical diggers.

Traffic clogged the roads leading in and out of Bam, 1,015 km (630 miles) southeast of Tehran. Survivors with any kind of motor transport loaded furniture and whatever else they could salvage and headed for other cities. Incoming traffic brought relief supplies, volunteers and relatives desperate for news of their kin.

There was some looting when vans of young men armed with pistols and Kalashnikov assault rifles drove into Bam and stole Red Crescent tents, while others on motorbikes chased aid trucks, picking up blankets thrown out by soldiers.

Local people and some aid workers said relief efforts were chaotic. “There is no organization. Whoever is stronger takes the aid,” said resident Mehdi Dehghani.

Underlining the scale of the disaster, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, held telephone talks about aid, even though their countries have no official ties.

A US Air Force C-130 Hercules landed in Kerman, near Bam, with a first shipment of aid and the US military said it would ship in about 70 tons of aid originally earmarked for reconstruction in Iraq after the US-led war. US Central Command said American airmen and Iranian soldiers worked together to unload the plane, the first American flight into Iran since the Iranian hostage crisis ended in 1981.

Freezing night-time temperatures over the past 48 hours and the disorganization of the relief effort in the face of the massive casualty toll further diminished hopes of survivors being found.

Ari Vakkilainen of Finn Rescues, a Finnish government international rescue organization, said: “I think there are not many people still alive under the rubble because of the way the buildings here are made. The bricks generally used in Bam buildings are made of baked mud that turns to dust and sand when buildings collapse, which means there are not many air pockets.”