Earthquake in Afghanistan Leaves More Than 800 Dead
More than 800 people were killed and 2,500 were injured after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the mountainous areas of eastern Afghanistan on Sunday night, Afghan officials said on Monday. The death toll would probably rise, they added, as rescue workers scrambled to reach communities stranded in isolated valleys hardly reachable by road.
The epicenter of the quake was near Jalalabad, a city of about 200,000 people, but most of the destruction took place in the province of Kunar, north of Jalalabad, where dozens of villages with mud and brick houses were hit. Less than 100 miles away, residents of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, felt the aftershocks across the city throughout the night, but no major damage was reported.
The quake was a shallow one, just five miles from the earth’s surface, which made it likelier to be more destructive, as shallower waves retain more of their power when hitting the surface. Soon after the initial shaking stopped, people scrambled in the middle of the night to reach neighbors trapped under the debris of collapsed houses, according to videos shared on social media.
Road access was difficult for rescue workers in the area’s steep terrain, where landslides had struck, said Kate Carey, the deputy head of the United Nations’ office of humanitarian affairs in Afghanistan. She said at least four eastern provinces, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Laghman and Kunar, had been affected by the quake.