Word: asnam
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Unlike Algeria's ancient coastal cities, with their crowded casbahs and narrow streets, the inland city of El Asnam in the fertile Cheliff River valley was starkly up to date. Its streets were wide, and its public buildings were modern and built of sandstone. Most of El Asnam's 125,000 inhabitants' homes were equally contemporary, and with good reason: just 26 years ago, the prosperous farming center 120 miles southwest of Algiers was devastated by a major earthquake, which killed 1,600 people. Thus the city's army barracks, sports stadium, police headquarters, hospital...
Last week, on Friday, the traditional Arab day of rest, the people of El Asnam again felt the earth move violently, not once but 20 times. The initial tremor registered 7.5 on the Richter Scale, which was slightly lower than the 7.7 recorded in September 1978, when 25,000 people were killed in northeast Iran. In El Asnam, the city was again laid waste, along with many of the farmhouses and villages in a 25-mile radius. Eyewitnesses estimated that 80% of El Asnam was destroyed; the Algerian Red Crescent initially reported that perhaps as many...
...quake struck at a time when most of El Asnam's office buildings and shops were closed because of the Muslim sabbath. But the streets and cafés of the residential neighborhoods teemed with families. Said a survivor: "Everything happened so quickly. The dogs did not have time to bark. It was all over within seconds." Apartment buildings tumbled like houses of cards. The walls of Le Chelif Hotel, which was the city's newest and fanciest, cracked wide open, and its roof caved in. The four-story hospital collapsed. A mosque, the city hall, police station...
...public for donations of blood. Shortly afterward, French and Tunisian medical teams were dispatched to Algeria. Britain and West Germany provided emergency supplies, and Switzerland sent its famed air-rescue detachment. Because of heavy damage to railroads, highways and bridges, however, help was slow to arrive in El Asnam, except for a fleet of Algerian military helicopters, which began ferrying seriously injured victims to hospitals in other cities. Finally, 24 hours after the earthquake, a full-fledged disaster force, equipped with bulldozers, cranes and 6,000 tents, reached the El Asnam area...