On the 1st of December, southeastern Iran has been struck by natural calamities, feeling the citizens shocked. Here are the details.
Three earthquakes hit eastern Iran in quick succession early Friday, the first a fairly strong magnitude 6.0 tremor that struck at a shallow depth close to the populous city of Kerman, the US Geological Survey said.
The quake, initially reported as a magnitude 6.3, was centered 36 miles (58 km) northeast of Kerman, which has a population of more than 821,000.
It struck at 6:32 a.m. (0232 GMT) and was very shallow, at a depth of 6.2 miles (10 km), which would have amplified the shaking.
A magnitude 6.0 quake is considered strong and is capable of causing severe damage.
It was followed by two less powerful 5.0 and 5.1 aftershocks in the same area, the survey said.
“For the moment, no deaths have been reported but there has been destroyed in several villages,” Hossein-Ali Mehrabizadeh, an official with the crisis unit in Kerman, told state television.
With the tremors hitting around 60 kilometers (37 miles) north of Kerman, USGS modeling predicted a low chance of widespread loss of life or property.
The University of Tehran’s seismology center gave slightly different figures, announcing an earthquake of 6.1, followed by aftershocks of 5.1 and 4.
The latest tremors come just over two weeks after a 7.3 quake killed more than 500 people in western Kermanshah province, close to the border with neighboring Iraq.
Iran sits on top of where two major tectonic plates meet and see frequent seismic activity.
Friday’s quake hit around 200 kilometers northwest of the ancient city of Bam, which was decimated by a catastrophic quake in 2003 that killed at least 31,000 people.
In 1990, a 7.4-magnitude quake in northern Iran killed 40,000 people, injured 300,000 and left half a million homeless, reducing dozens of towns and nearly 2,000 villages to rubble.
Iran has experienced at least two other major disasters in recent years — one in 2005 that killed more than 600 people and another in 2012 that left some 300 dead.
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