Afghan officials are afraid of this Hundreds of people lost their lives as a result of 7 recorded earthquakes of up to 6.3 degrees More than 300 people were injured in the incident that took place this Saturday in the Zinda Jan district of Herat province in western Afghanistan.
“There is not a town without hundreds of dead, and the number of victims may increase even more,” Mula Janan Sayeq, press director of the Ministry of Disaster Management, told EFE, although search operations continue.
Officials’ estimate is as follows: Number of people living in affected villages, The place where approximately a thousand people lived turned into a pile of rubble.
“People are under collapsed houses and maybe so many people (died) that different rescue teams are working there,” he said.
Although the official number of deaths in earthquakes recorded today is unknown, the NGO Doctors Without Borders Herat district hospital is said to support medical care“Where more than 300 injured people arrived,” as reported on social network X, formerly Twitter.
“We establishedo 5 medical tents with a capacity of up to 80 patients “We provide personnel and medical equipment support to the emergency department,” the international organization said.
Afghanistan felt at least seven tremors this day. First of all, the biggest The incident occurred at 12:11 at a depth of 14 kilometers and 33 kilometers from the city of Zindah Jan.According to USGS, it is located in Herat province.
This was followed by successive aftershocks of magnitude 5.5; 4.7; 6.3; and 5.9 respectively within a one-hour period.
HE fourth earthquake, also 6.3 degreesIt was recorded about ten kilometers from Zindah Jan and at a depth of about 29 kilometers.
The US seismological service then felt two more tremors, measuring 4.8 and 4.9 degrees respectively, in Herat province about an hour later.
Asian country is also among the countries Most probably natural disastersLocated in the Hindu Kush mountain range, it is a point of major seismic activity and a common starting point for terrestrial movements in the region.
However, Afghanistan does not have sufficient infrastructure to cope with disasters such as floods and earthquakes, and has an extremely vulnerable population, mostly poor.
At the end of June last year, a similar 5.9 magnitude earthquake that occurred in the Pktika and Khost provinces in eastern Afghanistan, bordering Pakistan, caused the death of more than a thousand people and the injury of approximately 1,500 people, as well as the destruction of hundreds of houses. .
Afghanistan also suffered One of the biggest disasters caused by the earthquakes that occurred in the north of the country in 1998In February, two earthquakes of magnitude 5.9 and 6 caused the death of approximately 4,000 people. A few months later, at the end of May, another magnitude 7 earthquake hit the region, killing approximately 5,000 people.