3. - usaid

along the south coast. Very little of Iran can be excluded from the
possibility of earthquake disasters. Tehran itself is vulnerable,
having felt 51 tremors last year. Over a ten year period from 1956
to 1966, the central plateau was hit by destructive earthquakesmeasuring
at least 5.57 on the Richter scale--on the average of once
every 18 months. From the year 1500 to 1930, there have been 166
"notable" earthquakes of which 45 occurred along a line that starts in
Syria, passes Mosul and the northern vicinity of Baghdad, and stretches
down the northern coast of the Persian Gulf past Bushehr and Bandar Abbas;
over 40 quakes occurred along the foothills of the Alborz range along
the Caspian coast and Gorgan up to Meshed; about 36 were confined to
the Tabriz area in Azarbaijan; 13 on the Hamadan-Isfahan =axis ; and 10
centered around Shiraz; while others did not fall into a pattern.
Earthquakes are an ever present threat to Iran. The country's vulnerability
has been charted by seismologists and its tragic experiences
over the years have been more than enough to confirm it. Contemporary
Iranians can remember quite a number of earthquakes. The horrors of the
1962 Qazvin quake (known in seismological literature as the Buyim-Zahra
earthquake) in which over 12,000 people died are still vivid their
memory. More recently, in April of 1968, a less serious but quite
destructive earthquake hit Azarbaijan Province, killing 38 and leaving
5,000 homeless. What would normally be a once-in-a-lifetime nightmare
has for the Iranians become a potentially recurring horrora with which
they are obliged to live.