David Alexander, a specialist in disasters, currently scientific director at the Scuola Superiore di Protezione Civile in Lombardy, Italy, asks why disaster-prone Iran did not have better earthquake preparations, and despairs that the same old myths are trotted out time and again.
The earthquake that hit Bam on December 26 was relatively mild and followed a predictable geological pattern, yet it killed tens of thousands of people.
More than being a massive natural disaster, the event is a terrible indictment of human negligence.
Whatever political expedient may eventually turn them into, natural disasters start as morally neutral phenomena which are nonetheless relentless in the way they expose the inner workings of society.
The Bam earthquake seems to have revealed a shocking lack of preparedness in Iran.
The Bam earthquake happened at 05:27 local time. Whereas the distribution of damaging earthquakes around the world is exactly balanced between the three periods 8 am to 4 pm, 4 pm to midnight and midnight to 8 am, between 80 and 95 percent of casualties occur in the last of these periods.
This is firstly because traditional housing in many major seismic zones is the least safe place to be, and secondly because people cannot take self-preserving action when they are asleep.
Behavioural research suggests that people's instantaneous reactions to the onset of major seismic shaking can have a very significant impact in reducing the death toll.
Even so, the average number of people killed per building that collapses is only somewhere in the range 0.12 to 0.34, though in the Bam case the buildings were so weak and collapsed so readily that the final ratio is likely to be anomalously high.
Nevertheless, in Bam the unsafe nature of vernacular housing was graphically demonstrated when 60 to 70 percent of it collapsed, with heavy loss of life.
USUAL MYTHS
Television reports from Bam speak solemnly of the high risk of epidemics caused by unburied dead bodies, despite the fact that eminent and authoritative experts have pointed out time and time again that dead bodies do not constitute a health hazard.
The Bam earthquake happened 18 months after the last mass-casualty seismic event in Iran, and yet the arrangements for disposing of the dead were utterly ineffective.
Then there was the vexed question of looting.
Reuters reported that armed men stole Red Crescent tents and others on motorbikes chased trucks that were tossing out blankets to the survivors.
Studies reveal that looting is a highly uncommon and circumscribed phenomenon in the aftermath of natural disasters, which are usually characterised by high levels of social participation.
The Reuters report from Bam did not give any indication of its magnitude, which was probably small.
Nor was there any indication of why young men went after tents and blankets. Was it to create a black market or to provide for their families?
Neither is it very likely that the fabric of society stood any chance of disintegrating into chaos, another cherished myth.
However, if nothing else, the image of blankets being tossed indiscriminately from the back of trucks implies a serious failure of relief distribution mechanisms.
INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS
Along come the international search-and-rescue teams.
No one would wish to belittle their efforts, and if one person is saved by their presence, then that would be a significant achievement.
However, there were two reasons why in the Bam case the presence of international rescuers was even less effective than usual (apparently they saved 30 people during 48 hours' work).
First, the local building materials -- stone with little shearing resistance, poorly-fired brick and mud brick -- produced more dust than is commonly the case and hence both reduced the size of void spaces in rubble that might contain living, trapped victims and contributed to asphyxiation through dust inhalation.
Generally, suffocation is much more effective at reducing survival times under rubble than are major blood loss, cranial trauma, hypothermia and dehydration.
Secondly, the weather was cold. Within 100 hours of the earthquake, hypothermia would halve survival rates among trapped people.
There is now a huge amount of evidence, accumulated from natural disasters all over the world, that it is local aid that rescues people in significant numbers, and in sudden impact disasters the critical period can be as short as six hours.
During this interval the degree of training and appropriateness of equipment of local rescuers will determine the efficiency of search-and-rescue operations.
Hence, a massive, expensive international rescue operation was launched to bring dead bodies out from collapsed buildings, something that could be done just as well with national resources.
It probably will not function well, as the key to body retrieval is heavy machinery, which is not supplied internationally.
NATIONAL EFFORTS
Even national aid is bound to be less effective than local efforts.
Huge increases in the numbers of blood donors were reported from Tehran, resulting, no doubt, in a massive temporary surplus in available blood supplies in the Iranian medical system.
This would not do much to help the survivors, as injuries that require major transfusion are seldom that numerous in earthquakes.
In most earthquakes, one of the primary causes of death is so-called crush syndrome. As a result of prolonged severe crushing, the cell membranes of the body's soft tissues become more permeable and the release of potassium, enzymes and myoglobin from within cells leads to kidney failure.
Given the prevalence of crush syndrome in major earthquakes, kidney dialysis is much more important than blood transfusions.
Apart from that, pre-hospital treatment is the greatest key to survival, especially where crush syndrome is involved, and that once again highlights the importance of local efforts.
Local medical efforts were of course hampered by the collapse of two hospitals, echoing similar losses in, for example, the 2001 El Salvador earthquake.
The decision to airlift 11,500 patients to medical facilities in other parts of the country is thus understandable -- the local hospitals would have been overwhelmed even if they had survived.
But as it involved a logistically cumbersome, medically risky, time-consuming and expensive exercise, it could hardly be described as the soul of efficiency.
PREPAREDNESS AND PLANNING
All too often emergency planning is either unsystematic or totally absent, yet there is very little in a natural disaster and its aftermath that cannot be foreseen by the systematic application of scenario methods and the use of reference events from the past.
Iran has an unusually rich stock of the latter. So has Kerman Province, in which Bam is located, as it experiences a major earthquake about once every 8.7 years.
Surely this is such a short interval that there is no excuse for not having effective plans
When disaster occurs, failure to plan in advance is suddenly, and often spectacularly, revealed as ineptness in the provision of relief and aid
By and large, not enough is being done to promote robust methods of emergency planning around the world.
The need is obvious, the techniques are tried and tested, but the stumbling block is the matter of how to convince political hierarchies to devote a proportion of national wealth to such initiatives.
REBUILDING
There is no technical reason why at least 90 per cent of what has been knocked down should not be elegantly rebuilt, and to reasonably anti-seismic standards. It is purely a matter of economics and organisation.
The International Council on Monuments and Sites -- an international NGO dedicated to the conservation of historical monuments -- says there is no technical reason why ancient buildings, including mud brick ones, need collapse in earthquakes. The know-how to render them safe has existed for decades, and in some cases centuries.
Paradoxically, earthquakes have the power to make the world a better place by encouraging the virtues of prudence, preparedness and organisation in the human populations of seismic areas.
Perhaps it is time to devote a substantial proportion of our considerable research expertise in the disasters field to determining why obvious lessons are being ignored at the expense of future public safety.
General view of downtown San Salvador November 26, 2009. A magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck off the coast of El Salvador on Thursday, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. REUTERS/Luis Galdamez (EL SALVADOR ...
