AHMEDABAD, India, Jan. 27 In Ahmedabad, Gujarats commercial capital and a city of 4.5 million, as many as 50 multistory buildings collapsed. Thousands of people besieged the fire station asking for help to dig out their relatives.
Desperate survivors braved aftershocks and clawed through rubble in search of missing loved ones Saturday in the wake of Indias worst earthquake in more than 50 years, a 7.9 magnitude temblor centered in the western Gujarat state near the Pakistan border. The staggering death toll of 13,000 was expected to rise as rescuers struggled to reach countless people trapped under debris.
Over 35,000 people had been injured and feared that as many as 5,500 were still trapped under the rubble.
The quake shook high-rise buildings hundreds of miles away in the capital, New Delhi, and was even felt more than 1,000 miles away in Nepal and Bangladesh.
All the deaths in India were recorded in the coastal state of Gujarat, where buildings swayed for more than two minutes.
The epicenter was near Bhuj, a desert town of 150,000 people in Gujarat. Ninety percent of the houses in the town were damaged, said Cabinet minister Pramod Mahajan.
P.I. Kanpuri, a police officer at the emergency state control room in Gandhinagar, said 1,400 people in Bhuj district had been killed. Reports from Bhuj said its army hospital was overflowing with injured and its civilian hospital had been flattened.
The earthquake is a calamity of national magnitude, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said. We have decided to meet the emergency on a war footing. This is the time for people to rally around.
Across the border in Pakistan, 10 people died when two houses collapsed. Authorities said many more were injured.
This is an emergency. We are facing a riotous crowd, Bhat said. A fear psychosis is developing in the city. People have fled their homes and are taking refuge in open fields.
After night fell, with temperatures at 55 degrees, survivors spread blankets and huddled around campfires.
Corpses were piled up on the verandah of the N.S. Hospital, while patients overflowing into the hallways wailed and screamed with broken limbs and bleeding wounds. PTI reported 70 people died while waiting to be treated.
Huge concrete slabs the size of rooms lay across streets in Ahmedabad. Cushions, shoes and other household debris littered the streets. Doctors said many people had died of asphyxia or in stampedes.
There was no damage to the two 220-megawatt nuclear plants in the state. But gas pipelines, most power supply stations, phone lines and water service were knocked out in Gujarat, an arid state that is prone to drought.
