about 60 miles from the devastated city of Bam struck Monday night killing at least eleven people.
Officials said about 30 villages still had not been contacted, so a higher death toll is anticipated. Helicopters were being dispatched to those villages Tuesday.
The quake hit at 10:12 p.m. Monday. It was centered on the town of Hossainabad in Fahraj county in Kerman province about 100 kilometers (60 miles) to the southeast of Bam, which was leveled by one of the country’s worst quakes seven years ago this month. (See map below.)
Since the Bam quake, Iran has been relatively quiet seismically. It has suffered only nine quakes with fatalities—although four of those fatal quakes have struck this year. But in almost five years before Monday’s quake, only 12 Iranians have died in earthquakes, an unusually low number.
The last super-quake in Iran was the one that leveled Bam December 27, 2003. The death toll there was put at 27,000.
In the seven years since then, the death toll from quakes before Monday’s has been 739, with 83 percent of the dead in just one. There were no fatal earthquakes in Iran in 2007 and 2009.
Here are the quakes with fatalities since the Bam earthquake:
Locale Scale Date Dead
Chalus 5.5 05/28/04 35
Zarand 6.4 02/22/05 612
Qeshm 5.9 11/27/05 10
Lorestan 6.0 03/30/06 70
Qeshm 6.1 09/10/08 7
Lamerd 5.8 07/21/10 1
Damghan 5.9 08/27/10 3
Fars 6.1 09/26/10 1
Fahraj 6.5 12/20/10 11
The deadliest earthquake to strike Iran in modern times killed an estimated 37,000 people June 21, 1990, brutalizing Gilan and Zanjan provinces.
There may have been some worse quakes in earlier eras, but death toll figures are very unreliable. A 1780 quake in Tabriz is thought to have killed from 50,000 to 200,000 persons. The published tolls from the 1990 quake and the 2003 Bam quake are themselves subject to question.
