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American Morning

Afghanistan Hit by Earthquakes

Aired March 26, 2002 - 08:05   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Up front this morning, northern Afghanistan is hit hard by a pair of deadly earthquakes. Some early reports from the quake area say the number of dead could run into the thousands as a result of the two quakes that destroyed five villages just north of Kabul.

CNN's Walt Rodgers joins us from Kabul. He has the very latest for us now on the impact of this quake -- Walt, good morning.

WALTER RODGERS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Paula.

Afghan officials are only guessing at this point at the death toll in this quake and they're putting the casualties, the fatalities, in the thousands. Now, part of the reason they can guess is simply because this country, although the size of Texas, has almost no infrastructure, wracked by war for 23 years. There's no telephone system. The area -- the epicenter of the quake is only about 100 miles north of Kabul, but there are torturous roads over mountain passes which makes it even more difficult to get information and relief supplies up there at this point.

The hardest hit area was the Baglan Province in northeastern Afghanistan. Nahareen (ph), the provincial capital, we are told, was all but destroy. Also, the government here in Kabul is saying some 15 villages were also destroyed in the quake with a magnitude of about 6.0.

The casualties, the actual number of the casualties won't be known for days until people start digging...

ZAHN: All right, we just lost Walt Rodgers talking about the impact of this quake. He has reported that they believe that it hit 6 on the Richter Scale. And one of the other things that Walt wanted to address is the difficulty of getting into the area because of mountain passes, because of the lack of infrastructure.

So it remains to be seen how quickly some of the aid organizations that are already in place because of the war will be able to get to the victims of this earthquake. But Walt was just recently told that as many as 4,800 people had lost their lives in these twin quakes. As soon as we have more information available we'll bring it to you.

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