News, December 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
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Iran quake survivors endure cold, sleepless nights
Khaleej Times, (Reuters)
29 December 2003
BAM, Iran - Aid supplies and rescue workers flowed into Bam on Monday, but survivors of the devastating earthquake were losing hope of finding loved ones after another sleepless, bitterly cold night.
Bam’s small airport was packed with a dozen or so military and civilian cargo planes in the early hours, barely able to find space on the tarmac that handled no more than a handful of planes each week before Friday’s quake.
Soldiers unloaded crates of bottled water and other supplies and an international rescue team mingled with scores of Iranian Red Crescent volunteers in the shattered terminal building.
The airport’s former taxi desk has become a makeshift pharmacy and the arrival hall has been converted into a temporary hospital ward.
For survivors living in tents or simply sleeping under blankets in streets, hope was fast fading of finding lost relatives and friends under rumble that was once their homes.
Fatima Momen Abadi, 30, wandered among those huddling round open fires to keep warm.
Sleepless nights
She was unable to sleep after losing her sister and three daughters in the quake.
“It is very important (to find the bodies)... Maybe they have found them and buried them. I have no hope,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion.
Her own home lay in ruins close to a tent where she has been accommodated.
Kobra Abbasi Nejad, 53, lost four of her six adult children when the ceiling collapsed in the bedroom of their home.
“We wish we were killed, not them. They were young,” she sobbed, standing beside her injured husband after collecting an extra blanket from a passing aid truck patrolling the streets.
Some aid workers still held out hope that people could be hauled out of the ruins alive.
“It’s a possiblity that for two to three days they will be found,” said Red Crescent worker Hassan Al Saadi.
But his last task had been to pull out out the bodies of a family of five at one ruined house. Saadi, who travelled in from a town several hundred km (miles) away and was sleeping rough like many of Bam’s residents, said some rescue work had been hampered by lack of equipment such as diggers and generators for lighting.
“We don’t have enough big equipment... But from today, everything is coming,” he said.
As searches went into a fourth day, rescuers said they were no longer finding survivors -- only the mangled remains of people killed when the world’s most lethal earthquake in at least 10 years levelled Bam in southeastern Iran.
“(Rescue operations) will continue at least for one more day (until midnight on Monday) when an assessment will be made to continue or not,” Alain Pasche, of a U.N. rescue coordination team, told Reuters.
“After five days the chances of finding anyone alive are very slim,” Pasche said.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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