Bam – 18 years on

It was early morning just before dawn. Everyone was expecting to wake up with the calm sound of muezzins welcoming the sunrise to take over the twilight of the city. But at 5:28, violent tremors changed the lives of the people in Bam forever. In a matter of a few seconds, a massive quake destroyed most of the town in Iran’s south-eastern province of Kerman. A tragedy that later was determined to be the death of over 26,000 people and injuring 30,000 with lifelong injuries.

The city of the sweetest dates was tasting one of its bitterest days. The task ahead was enormous. Within a few hours, the Government sent the first rescue teams and requested NGOs and international organizations to support the search for survivors. No one hesitated to answer the call of assistance. The Iranian Ambassador to Switzerland, contacted the Director of the UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) to request help to coordinate the wider rescue efforts.

The UN was amongst the first responders. Agencies such as UNICEF and WFP immediately started organizing clean water, food, and shelter for families who had lost everything. During earthquakes or any other disasters, responses from the UN side are conducted if the Government accepts foreign assistance. As a result of the contact between the Iranian Ambassador and the Director of the OCHA, the UN opened an office in Bam together with the Swiss Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) teams. 48 hours after the initial requests for help from the Iranian authorities, 34 urban search and rescue teams from 27 countries were at the scene and scoured the rubble to find survivors and to recover the dead bodies. 

To help coordinate rescue efforts further, the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination Team (UNDAC) became the liaison between the USAR rescue teams and the Local Emergency Management Authority (LEMA), and soon after the International Federation of the Red Cross and the Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) were involved in the coordinated response.

What became very clear in the aftermath of the Bam earthquake, was risk preparedness being critical. Therefore, all that matters in situations like this, and for a country prone to natural disasters like Iran, ensuring an effective strategy to tackle the situation is a necessity. This explains the unsparing services and assistance by OCHA in the country ever since the Bam earthquake.

The Bam earthquake deeply impacted the UN and the international community alike. On 8 January 2004, Jan Egeland, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), emphasized the advocacy role of the UN following the devastating quake in Bam. He highlighted that the UN “has been closely linked to ensuring […] the longer-term needs and development effort, as such, is increasingly now taken over by UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)”.

This call was sufficient to demonstrate the need for optimizing the risk deduction and risk management strategies from a different approach. As a result, Jan Egeland joined Manuel Saurez del Toro (president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)) for the first-ever joint launch of a United Nations Flash Appeal that was initiated for the common purpose of assistance in the aftermath of the Bam Earthquake.

The significance of adopting an effective long-term strategy in a country like Iran which is prone to natural disasters is imperative. On average, Iran encounters 10,000 earthquakes annually. According to the Iranian Seismology Centre, in the Iranian year 1399 (March 2020 - March 2021) alone, Iran experienced 153 earthquakes with a magnitude higher than 4 Richter and 18 above 5. The most devastating Earthquakes in the past decades of Iran were marked as Sarpol-e Zahab at 7.3 Richter and 620 estimated deaths, Manjil-Rudbar at 7.4 Richter and 37,000 death, and Bam with 6.7 Richter and 26,271 death.

The only acceptable response to such disasters is long-term reconstruction, recovery, and risk reduction. And this is exactly what UN agencies are offering and promoting in support of the Government. After the Bam earthquake, OCHA continued its collaboration with the Iranian Government to keep improving the response to emergencies. This can be seen by collaboration of OCHA and the Iranian National Disaster Management Organization (NDMO) in the 2019 floods. Another example of one of these long-term strategies that was adopted after the Bam earthquake is mutual preparedness activities that have been conducted including a joint earthquake simulation.

Despite Bam’s date palms still bending from the sandstorms, efforts to recover from the devastating events of 18 years ago continue. Although efforts to diminish the effects of such disasters are in place, we can never fully eradicate their existence and cause. It is hoped that no nation ever sees the darkness of such tragedy. However, it is more important to stand united as rays of light when hardships strike again.