Startled by the obliteration of its eastern city of Bam by an earthquake, Iran is considering moving its capital from seismically active Tehran to a safer part of the country.
Iranian scientists warned more than 10 years ago that a powerful earthquake under the teeming city of 12-million people could claim 720 000 lives and paralyse the state. The city is jolted by several tremors each year.
The debate was reopened after the government was heavily criticised in Iran’s media for its failure to foresee the destruction of Bam and the death of more than 30 000 people on December 26.
”The supreme national security council will shortly discuss a plan to move the capital from Tehran,” the council’s chairman, Hassan Rohani, told the Iranian daily, Hayat-e No, yesterday.
Rohani said the original 1991 proposal to move the city had been shelved ”due to resistance from certain entities in the establishment”.
The proposal would be reviewed and resubmitted for the consideration of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, by the end of March, Rohani said. But he did not say where the capital might be moved to.
A government spokesperson, Abdollah Ramazanzadeh, confirmed that high-level discussions on moving the capital were taking place, but said these were at an early stage.
”There have been contradictory views and still our experts have not been able to reach a conclusion,” Ramazanzadeh said on Monday.
Bahram Akasheh, a professor of geophysics at Tehran University, has predicted that a quake of similar magnitude to that in Bam, which measured 6,8 on the Richter scale, would kill at least 720 000 people.
Professor Akasheh has written to President Mohammed Khatami to propose moving the capital to the central Iranian city of Isfahan, the capital of Persia until the late 16th century. Tehran became the capital in 1788.
”It would be better to have the capital in somewhere near Isfahan, that would be safer,” Prof Akasheh said. ”Other countries have changed their capital without any adverse effect.”
Other experts have warned that a major earthquake under one of the world’s many earthquake-prone supercities could cause one million deaths.
”People do not like to think in terms of an earthquake disaster of one million fatalities. Nonetheless, I am convinced this is possible,” said Max Wyss, the director of the World Agency of Planetary Monitoring and Earthquake Risk Reduction in Geneva.
Facing public anger over the way Bam’s mud-brick buildings crumbled to dust, Iranian officials admitted last week that building codes in other cities, including Tehran, had not been adequately enforced, making them vulnerable to even moderate earthquakes. – Guardian Unlimited Â