Survivors are often found alive in rubble several days after a quake, and it is normal to be pulling out survivors two and three days after a tremor. So, the government’s sudden halt stunned people.
There were even some assertions that the government didn’t care because the quake struck an area populated by Azeris who do not speak Farsi. But the Supreme Leader himself is half Azeri.
Majlis deputies representing the affected areas complained about inadequate relief efforts, especially a shortage of tents for survivors, the Majlis news service reported Monday, and Speaker Ali Larijani stepped into the debate.
“The crisis management headquarters must take broader steps to alleviate these concerns,” Larijani said.
There was no dispute over halting the search for the living about 20 hours after the quake hit. Health Minister Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar and Emergency Response Director Gholam-Reza Masumi all announced the end of the search.
Mohammad-Najjar said, “Search and rescue operations have ended and we are now working to ensure survivors’ needs in terms of food and shelter.”
The health minister said 1,380 injured people had been found and treated when she announced the halt to the government’s search for the living Sunday. But the next day, officials told the Majlis the count of the injured was up to 3,037, more than doubling overnight and proving that citizen rescuers were still finding lots of living people in the rubble.
Bahram Akasheh, a seismologist, said he was appalled by the casualty figures. He said no more than 10 people should have been injured in such a quake, but blamed the poor housing in villages for the high toll.
One official said there was no need for a longer search because the area was sparsely populated. But Abbas Falahi, the Majlis deputy representing Ahar and Hareese on the eastern side of the stricken area, said it was his understanding that rescue workers had not even reached 10 to 20 villages in the area when the search was ended.
He said even the people in villages reached right after the quake struck remained in “dire need of food and drinking water.” The Mehr news agency quoted him as saying, “Despite the promises of officials, little first aid has been distributed in the region and most people are left without tents.”
Allahverdi Dehqani, the Majlis deputy representing the Varzaqan area, said the first emergency team did not reach villages in his district until seven hours after the double quake.
Others also expressed disbelief that the authorities could have reached some of the most remote villages so soon.
“I know the area well. There are some villages that you can’t even reach by car,” one doctor in the city of Tabriz told Reuters by telephone Monday, declining to give his name because of the sensitivity of the issue. “It’s not possible for them to have finished so soon.”
The doctor said he had worked for 24 hours non-stop following the quake, attending to patients from surrounding villages who were rushed to Tabriz for medical care.
“In the first hours after the quake, it was ordinary people and volunteers in their own cars going to the affected areas,” the doctor said. “It was more ordinary people helping out than the official emergency staff.”
Health Minister Vahid-Dastjerdi, the sole women in the cabinet, said her ministry was in need of helicopters to transport the injured from remote villages to hospitals.
The conservative newspaper Asr-e Iran reported flatly that a full 24 hours after the earthquake, some villages had not yet been visited by relief teams.
It also reported that many villages that are accessible had not received aid by then. “[Residents] say that most of the villages have been destroyed and still no tents have been sent, nor has any help been sent for the victims,” the daily reported.
Officials, however, said the emergency response to the disaster was rapid, even though relief teams were hampered by the remoteness of many of the villages.
“We will rebuild these areas before the start of the winter,” Hassan Ghadami, an emergency management official in the Interior Ministry, told lawmakers Monday, a common promise after earthquakes that just as commonly goes unfulfilled.
Ghadami didn’t accept criticism of the rescue and relief effort. “Relief forces were dispatched in a normal and natural way and they were dispatched to the affected areas quickly,” he said.
But his boss, Gholam-Reza Masumi, the head of emergency services, said he was concerned about a shortage of toilets and bottled drinking water and expressed fear of an outbreak of disease. He said corpses of dead farm animals were found lying near water sources and could contribute to disease.
Reza Sheibani, a Tabriz resident who owns a 24-hour pharmacy in Ahar, told Reuters by telephone that the government had acted well in deploying security forces to ensure public order in the panicked hours after the quakes.
President Ahmadi-nejad left as planned Monday morning for Saudi Arabia, where he attended a meeting of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) expected to focus on the crisis in Syria. But that exposed him to criticism at home that he was not showing empathy with the disaster victims.
In an editorial titled “Mr. Ahmadi-nejad, where have you gone?” Asr-e Iran criticized his decision to leave the country less than two days after the quakes. “In every other part of the world, the tradition is that when natural disasters happen, leaders will change their plans and visit the affected areas in order to show their compassion … and observe rescue efforts,” Asr-e Iran wrote.
Tabriz residents and legislators also criticized state-run television’s early coverage of the disaster, saying it did not reflect the extent of the damage in the first hours.
The lack of coverage, some said, contributed to a sense that the central government in Tehran did not care much about the people because they are Azeri Turks, the biggest ethnic minority in the country.
“Even though [on Saturday night] hundreds of people were under the rubble, on state television broadcasts … there was no mention of the disaster,” said Ali-Reza Manadi-Safidan, a legislator representing Tabriz, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).
“[State television] was busy counting how many medals Iran won” in the Olympics, the doctor in Tabriz said. “They didn’t have any reaction to this event.”
Larijani said Monday that state television ought to better reflect the country’s sympathies for the earthquake victims.
Starting Tuesday, state television aired extensive footage of air drops and of officials handing out food and tents.