When nothing else happened we went back inside and later on the earthquake struck

“When nothing else happened we went back inside, and later on the earthquake struck. I dragged myself out, but I have no idea what happened to my baby.”Ali Reza Shokrani woke early and left for work. When the quake hit minutes later he was knocked to the ground. He ran back to find the house in ruins and his family buried alive Seven people died. Those left alive are cursing themselves for failing to act on the warning tremors before the catastrophe. On Christmas night the ground shook several times, making eerie noises, but such shocks are common in this unstable zone, and most inhabitants of the city simply went back to sleep.”We were sitting inside and I was playing with my six- month-old son. There was a huge tremor and we ran out,” said Azam Deghani, standing by a line of tents at a road near the cemetery.

But the question is whether the survivors have the stomach for such a project. An American offer to send a high-level delegation was rejected by the Iranian leadership.Long-term aid will certainly be needed if the Iranian government is to fulfil its pledge to rebuild Bam within two years. Now, with almost 30,000 earthquake victims laid to rest, new arrivals have slowed to a trickle.Small knots of survivors gather around burial plots, but one young man comes alone. He limps to a grave – the resting-place of every other member of his large family – and sits down in the dirt, crying disconsolately.The quake that destroyed this mud-brick city was extraordinarily concentrated – travel more than five miles outside Bam in any direction and there is no damage – but the final toll could be the worst in any natural disaster in decades, exceeding Iran’s grim record from 1990 when a quake in the north of the country left 35,000 dead.Its scale prompted the first reduction in hostility for more than two decades between Iran and the US, which sent rescue teams and eased sanctions to allow aid to flow in more quickly, but this weekend it was doubtful whether there would be any lasting change in relations. The woman, Shahrbanou Mazandarani, was located by sniffer dogs in the ruins of a collapsed building. Soldiers saw a hand protruding from the rubble then heard a weak voice and, after three hours, succeeded in digging her out.Otherwise there is little now to disturb the rubble of the devastated city.

They were calling it a miracle yesterday – with some justification, as Iranian rescue workers pulled a woman, believed to be in her late 90s, alive and apparently in good health from the rubble in Bam a full eight days after an earthquake destroyed the city.
“She doesn’t have a scratch on her face,” said Masoumeh Malek of the Red Crescent. A week ago the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery was a roaring, dusty swarm of activity, with heavy machinery digging mass graves and queues of trucks disgorging bodies for burial. He believes his buildings, with their vaults and domes, would be more sensitive to the local environment and are “cheaper than American steel constructions” (a permanent “super-adobe” house can be erected for little more than the price of a tent), but few aid agencies are willing to take them up.They tend, he says, to take the “quick fix” attitude all too often adopted by authorities in the wake of mass devastation. Having worked for many years in areas frequently stricken by natural disasters, including 11 years in Iran, he is fiercely critical of this “short-sighted” approach.”It is extremely disheartening to see millions of people suffering while bureaucrats refuse to find better long-term solutions. Will this earthquake be the last big disaster? Of course not. We need to find a new direction instead of quickly putting up buildings in the old haphazard way.”Mr Khalili wants a research centre set up to deal not only with Bam, but also with all the other mud-brick villages in Iran.”This centre should be separate from the government; an international, open forum that is based on integrating traditional and modern technology, he said.

But he admits this is unlikely: “The bureaucracy in Iran is unbreakable It would be a miracle for any new ideas to get through.”. “Super-adobe”, he says, combines the region’s traditional use of earth with techniques that enhance resistance to earthquakes.As plans to reconstruct Bam get under way, his distinctive designs have attracted much interest but no commitments Mr Khalili is not surprised. From his Cal-Earth Institute in the Mojave Desert, 50 miles east of Los Angeles, he promotes a technique which he believes could also be used by Nasa for constructing bases on Mars or the Moon.The architect knows Bam well, calling it one of the most important historic examples of earth architecture in the world. In comparison with Bam’s purely mud-brick buildings, 90 per cent of which quickly collapsed in last week’s quake, Mr Khalili’s designs have been judged by independent laboratories in America to be strong enough to withstand a pull of 27,000lb – equivalent to a concrete-filled truck dangling off a cliff. They have been approved by building authorities in California as safe for the state’s earthquake zone.Mr Khalili used to have an architectural practice in Tehran and Los Angeles, but sold it before the Iranian revolution to concentrate on building with earth.