The 1990 Manjil–Rudbar Earthquake

A Night When Everything Changed

It's hard to find words for the kind of darkness that settles in the mountains before dawn in northern Iran. The wind comes down the slopes and through old villages clustered along the edge of the Alborz range. On June 21, 1990, most people were asleep—farmers, schoolchildren, entire families worn out from the day’s work. By 12:30 in the morning, the world was quiet except for the song of insects and the far-off bark of a restless dog.

And then, in less than a minute, centuries’ worth of certainty vanished.

People remember it as a sound before it was a sensation—a deep, rolling roar, the earth’s own thunder, tearing through the ground and up into houses built of brick and mud. The shaking that followed lasted about forty seconds, yet for those who survived, it was as if time fractured alongside the walls.

Trouble Beneath the Surface

This part of Iran is no stranger to tremors. The green hills and patchwork farmlands sit where great tectonic plates grind against each other: the Arabian Plate pressing northward into the Eurasian. The fault lines here have a reputation, justifiably earned, for occasional fits of violence.

Even so, life continues. Towns like Manjil and Rudbar have stood for generations, their buildings rising according to tradition, necessity, and—too often—old habits resistant to change. Before 1990, experts warned about the risks: Many homes, schools, and even hospitals had been built with the hope that the next big quake was still far off. But in the villages and small towns, economic reality competed with scientific caution. Retrofitting cost money; building codes were official on paper, but enforcement was shaky, especially in rural places already struggling to get by.

Smaller quakes had rattled the region before—bad enough to serve as warnings, not enough to force action at scale. It was a fragile peace, invisible until the mortar cracked.

The Earthquake: 40 Seconds That Redefined Lives

At 00:30:13 Iranian time, the main shock hit. 7.4 on the moment magnitude scale, though some stations would argue for a tick or two higher. What mattered was the energy released and the sudden helplessness. The earthquake’s epicenter sat uncomfortably close to Manjil, but the destruction shot outward—rippling through Gilan and Zanjan provinces, felt even in Tehran, two hundred kilometers away.

For about forty seconds, the ground moved like water. Houses fell apart as if made of sand. Multi-story buildings crumpled, their roofs pancaking down in an instant. In the darkness, heavy objects slid and toppled; entire hill slopes slumped into deadly landslides, wiping out roads and pushing whole sections of villages down into the valleys.

Some survivors describe a “sound of the world ending”—a crushing mix of breaking stone, shattering glass, and the sudden, panicked shouts echoing off mountains now splintered by the earth’s movement.

The aftershocks came hard and fast, some as strong as 6.5 in the days that followed. Fear made it impossible to sleep indoors. When daylight finally crawled over the hills, much of what had been alive and whole the night before had gone silent and still.

Searching for Life in the Debris

Within an hour of the main shock, those still able to stand began searching for neighbors and loved ones. With no electricity, villagers used lanterns, matches, and the rising sun to survey the devastation. Many dug with their bare hands, clearing bricks and roofing wood, calling out in the hope for an answer. In some places, there was nothing left to search—a house simply gone, scattered in the dust.

Roads into the worst-hit areas were mangled or blocked by landslides. The few that remained passable were jammed with the desperate: survivors trying to get out, and volunteers determined to get in. Communication lines collapsed alongside the buildings, so word of the scale of tragedy traveled slowly at first—then suddenly, the news was everywhere. Iranian radio began to count the dead, then the injured, but the numbers grew so quickly that estimates felt unreal.

Entire villages—names with no translation outside local memory—were erased in a single night.

The Agony of Waiting

Hospitals in Rasht, Qazvin, and other nearby cities filled in a matter of hours. On the first day, most casualties arrived in private cars, on tractor beds, anything that could move. There weren’t enough beds, doctors, or supplies. The wounded waited outside, while overwhelmed staff tried to turn disaster into order.

Relief arrived: Iranian Army units, the Red Crescent, and everyday people from across the country. But there was no miracle fix. Roads were battered, bridges gone, and every aftershock undid some bit of progress. Local leaders pleaded for tents, clean water, food—a way to keep the newly homeless alive through the aftermath.

International help was both a promise and a challenge. Despite political tensions in 1990, the Iranian government accepted assistance: medical teams from Switzerland, Japan, the USSR, Austria; search-and-rescue units, crates of medicine, and specialized tools. Even so, getting to the broken towns often took days. For some, help came too late.

The Scale of Loss

The figures from those weeks stagger the imagination: More than 35,000 lives lost, many of them children and elderly, their names lost alongside the homes they’d built stone by stone. Some estimates push that toll even higher, closer to 50,000. More than 60,000 were injured, many now living with permanent scars and disabilities. The homeless numbered around 400,000—nearly half a million people, their lives reduced to what could be carried or salvaged from the wreckage.

Economic losses reached eight billion U.S. dollars at the time—a number cold in its abstraction, but no less real in its aftermath. Over 200,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged. Entire fields, once green and orderly with crops, turned into twisted ground riddled with fissures; livestock were lost, water supplies contaminated, power lines down for weeks. Trade along the Caspian corridor sputtered to a stop.

For months after, once-empty plots filled with tents. Families cooked over open fires and waited in line for relief—food, blankets, medicine—supplied by aid groups and the government, never enough to meet the pain of so many at once.

What Could Have Been Done?

Amid the mourning, there were questions—some whispered, some shouted. Could more lives have been saved if building standards had been strictly enforced? Would earthquake-proofing, even at its most basic, have kept houses standing just long enough for families to escape?

Government officials, pressed by grief and public outcry, acknowledged mistakes. Seismic codes, they said, would no longer be optional. In cities, new buildings went up with steel frames and reinforced concrete—standard now, in the shadow of loss. Rural areas, poorer and harder to reach, saw progress too, but never as quickly or thoroughly.

The Manjil–Rudbar earthquake became a milestone, a before-and-after. Disaster response was reorganized: more training, better equipment, plans to coordinate between civilian and military agencies, acceptance that foreign help could save lives. Community drills became routine. In university lecture halls, the science pressed forward—new studies of the Alborz fault, maps redrawn to show where the next wave might hit.

The Living Memory

Decades have passed, and for many Iranians, the nightmare remains vivid as yesterday. Some survivors still live in rebuilt houses that sit atop the same invisible lines that ruptured their lives in 1990. Each anniversary, families return to what remains of their old homes, laying flowers where they can, whispering the names of those lost under the ruins.

For a country living with the reality of seismic risk, the earthquake’s lessons are carved deep into the national consciousness. Some are hopeful: earthquake-safe schools, smarter alarms, the courage of neighbors who, faced with disaster, did not look away. Others are unfinished, a reminder that what happened in Manjil and Rudbar might happen again—unless warnings are respected, and vigilance kept.

For all the stories of suffering—and there are more than numbers can hold—there are stories of resilience. In that early morning darkness, and in the hard weeks afterward, strangers became family; neighbors shared what little they had. In the battered hills of northern Iran, among wild roses and scarred fields, people stood up and began again.

History, in the end, is not just the record of what is lost. It is a ledger of survival—and the reminders left behind, warning against complacency, and testifying to what ordinary people can endure when the earth shakes and the world turns upside down.