The Night the Earth Went Wild

Through the rubble heap that had once been the quiet farming village of Buin walked Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, Shah of Iran. On either side, the ruins of mud-brick houses were piled high above him; the sickening stench of unburied bodies poisoned the air. Grimy, sobbing villagers milled around him. "I have lost all I had. O Father of the Nation," cried one old woman, falling to her knees. "My husband, two sons, four daughters, and my two brothers with their nine children."

Finally, the Shah climbed onto the hood of an army truck to list the villagers' immediate needs. There were only 400 clustered around him; 3.000 of Buin's 6,500 people had perished in one horrifying minute. The earthquake that demolished Buin and 100 other villages had already accounted for some 10.000 deaths; hundreds more were reported daily as masked Iranian soldiers shoveled through the debris in search of bodies.

The earthquake hit at 10:52 on a still, starry night, wrenching a jagged fault 30 miles beneath the surface in an area 60 miles long, 25 miles wide. Marveled Sayid Abdullah Hussein, a village schoolteacher: "The earth went wild with wrath. Then, suddenly, the roaring ended and there was silence amidst the darkness and dust. I called again and again for my wife and family. But there was no answer."

The worst recorded disaster in the nation's modern history, the quake was 100 times more violent than the temblor that killed some 20,000 in the Moroccan city of Agadir in 1960; if the epicenter had hit only 90 miles away in Teheran, scientists estimated, more than a million Iranians would have been killed or injured. Though every available rescue unit rushed to the stricken area, some of the villages were so remote that survivors huddled in the ruins for days before medicine and supplies reached them. A dozen nations offered Iran immediate aid. Within 28 hours after the first tremor, U.S. Air Force planes from Europe were landing in Iran with aid that included a zoo-bed Army field hospital, two helicopter rescue teams, 1,000 tons of food.

As the Shah flew from village to village, damage seemed even worse than at first expected. Wailed the village mullah of Danesfahan, where 3,200 of 4,500 inhabitants perished: "We have brought this evil on ourselves. It is God's vengeance for our sins." But the real evil, experts decided, lies in the peasants' age-old technique of building thick-walled, mud-brick houses that instantly collapse on their occupants in an earthquake. After his inspection, the Shah announced plans to rebuild the nation's 50.000 mud-hut villages.* It will take at least 15 years--if new earthquakes do not hasten the task.

* Also in dire need of repair: the area's intricate, ingenious system of underground conduits --called Qanats--which have been used for hundreds of years to distribute water from mountain springs to the arid plateaus.

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