Iranian Earthquake Shakes the Middle East

A second quake within a week has hit Iran, this one doing most of its damage along the Iran-Pakistan Border today, shaking buildings as far as India, but doing greatest damage in the Pakistani town of Mashkal, where 34 were killed and 80 injured. Though the sizable quake, which hit at 7.8 at a depth of nine miles, shook up Iran, it is unclear whether there are any casualties on the Iran side. An initial Iranian state run press said that 40 people were killed, but now that information has been removed from their website and the official claim is that nobody was killed at all.

One resident in Iran who felt the quake, Manouchehr Karimi, told the Associated Press that “the quake period was long” and hit “when many people were at home to take a midday nap.”

In the Iranian city of Zahedan, people poured into the streets when the quake struck, but despite being a higher magnitude quake than the 6.6 quake of 2003, that earthquake killed 26,000 people, and this one seemingly no Iranians at all.

The damage in Mashkal, nevertheless, has been called “massive,” and hundreds of mud homes have collapsed, delivering most of the injuries. That is why Pakistani military has been deployed to use helicopters and to set up medical tents to attend to those injured during the quake.