Three survivors pulled from quake devastation

Rescue workers pulled three more survivors from the rubble of Bam’s devastating earthquake – including a man saved today from a flattened house – as relief crews restored some electricity and rushed more aid into the ruined ancient city.

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, workers said they had rescued a 40-year-old man from the remains of a home today. The man was conscious enough to open his eyes from time to time before they sent him to hospital.

Earlier, Iranian television said another survivor, 27-year-old Yadallah Saadatmand, was pulled from the rubble overnight with only a broken pelvis.

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

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 five babies were born since Tuesday – three boys delivered in a French field hospital and two girls delivered in a Ukrainian field hospital.

US aid workers began admitting patients to an American field hospital 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 temporarily eased restrictions on exports and private assistance to Iran, with US Secretary of State Colin Powell saying in Washington 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 sidewalk 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.

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.

Estimates on the death toll varied.

A UN report that cited government figures said the death toll by Tuesday was at least 33,000. A provincial government spokesman, Asadollah Iranmanesh, said the confirmed toll was not yet that high but he predicted it would top 30,000.