Man pulled alive from quake devastation

A man was pulled alive from the rubble of Iran’s devastating earthquake today as relief workers restored some electricity and rushed more aid into the ruined ancient city of Bam.

A provincial official said the death toll would top 30,000 but that it would not reach 40,000.

Although hopes for survivors were fading, Iranian television said 27-year-old Yadallah Saadatmand was rescued from the rubble with only a broken pelvis.

Television footage showed smiling hospital nurses around Saadatmand, who was wearing an oxygen mask and did not speak.

A Taiwanese team hoped it could rescue a baby detected by sniffer dogs but found only the infant’s body.

US aid workers who set up a field hospital on New Year’s Day said they were shocked by their initial look at the damage brought by the 6.6-magnitude quake last Friday.

The American assistance stands out as rare contact between the nations since US-Iranian relations were broken by the seizure of the Embassy in Teheran in 1979.

The Bush administration today temporarily eased restrictions on exports and private assistance to Iran, with US Secretary of State Colin Powell saying that “at this time of great emergency we must do everything we can to help people in desperate need.”

Aftershocks have rumbled Bam repeatedly since the quake – with two to three a day – and remain a “real danger” because the ruins could easily topple over, said Ted Pearn, the top UN relief worker in Bam.

Taking a first assessment of the structural damage, six American aid workers passed the mangled remains of crushed cars, women in chadors cooking by gas stoves on the pavement beside their tents and people still sifting through the rubble for their battered possessions.

Iranian authorities have begun registering people and issuing food ration cards, while aid workers have begun restoring electricity to parts of Bam. Street lights are now working on main thoroughfares.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was to hold a memorial service in Bam by dusk to end a seven-day mourning period, Iranian radio reported.

Among the recently rescued survivors, an 80-year-old deaf and blind woman pulled from the rubble yesterday was expected to recover after suffering only a broken shoulder, doctors said.

“This is the power of God,” Dr Bahman Fasihpour told reporters who saw the woman covered in a blanket and receiving intravenous medication. “She has a fracture in her shoulder. That’s her only injury. She will be OK.”

Medical workers reported more good news amid the gloom as three baby boys were born in a French field hospital – one on Tuesday and two on Wednesday.

Pearn said officials plan to start setting up three camps with heated tents to get the homeless out of small tents pitched on the roadside that offer little protection from near-freezing nighttime temperatures.

Officials estimate the camps will need to house about 40,000 people – but they are still not clear how many remain in the city after many residents fled after the quake.

It is also unclear how many bodies remain buried beneath the rubble or if any more survivors can be found.

Iran’s orphanages are rapidly filling as aid workers sort the living from the dead and deliver young survivors to the provincial capital of Kerman, 120 miles northwest of the destroyed ancient city of Bam.

An estimated 1,500 children have been recovered without family so far and are being held at orphanages.

Forty-eight countries have now sent aid teams, with more than 1,000 foreign workers now at the scene. More than 200 foreign planes have brought assistance to the airports in Dam and Kerman.

A top priority in the days ahead was to prevent the outbreak of typhoid or cholera, though there have been no reports of epidemics yet.