Employees gather outside their offices, located in high-rise buildings, in Dubai yesterday, following a powerful earthquake that hit southeastern Iran and felt in Gulf states.
MOSCOW/tehran: Iran’s Russian-built nuclear power plant at Bushehr was not affected by the country’s powerful earthquake yesterday and continues its operations as normal, a spokesman for the Russian state nuclear corporation said.
The Bushehr nuclear power plant on the Gulf is located some 950km west of Khash, a town near the epicentre of what Iran said was a 7.5 magnitude quake.
“A representative at the site said they did not even feel the tremors,” Rosatom spokesman Sergei Novikov said. “The epicentre was far away from Bushehr.”
Built by Russia despite initial protests from Israel and the United States, Bushehr began adding electricity to the Iranian power grid in 2011.
The powerful earthquake in Iran hit hundreds of homes in Pakistan, killing more than 30 people in a remote community close to the desert border, officials said. It comes a week after one struck near Iran’s Gulf port city of Bushehr, killing at least 30 people and injuring 800.
At least 27 people were hurt in Iran, according to a local governor speaking to the official Irna news agency, but there was no immediate confirmation of any deaths. A local health official in Iran told the Fars news agency that more than 20 villages were probably “severely damaged,” based on initial reports.
But the deputy head of Iran’s state crisis management organisation, Morteza Akbarpour, told Fars casualties should be low considering the rural setting of the stricken area.
Irna said crisis management authorities had declared a state of emergency in the quake-hit area.
The earthquake also shook buildings in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, across the waters of the Gulf in the United Arab Emirates. It was also felt in Qatar, the Saudi capital Riyadh and in Oman.
In the tourist hub of Dubai, residential and office buildings were evacuated and thousands of people gathered outside skyscrapers.
AFP
