2017 Kermanshah earthquake

The night the ground tore open at 21:48

It was late autumn and the light had already fallen away in the folds of the Zagros. In towns like Ezgeleh and Sarpol-e Zahab, families had closed shutters against the chill and prepared for another quiet evening. At 18:18:17 UTC — 21:48 local time — the world jolted. A sharp, prolonged roar rolled through the valleys. Houses sheared, clay and concrete gave way, and people who had minutes earlier been finishing supper were suddenly in the street with dust in their throats and a night that no one in the region would forget.

The mainshock registered magnitude 7.3 and originated at a shallow depth of roughly 23 kilometers. That combination — a strong tremor that broke close to the surface — meant violent shaking over a wide area. The first hours were a blur of collapsing walls, raised dust, and a relentless aftershock sequence that kept people out of damaged buildings for days.

Where two continental plates argue and the land keeps score

Western Iran sits where the Arabian Plate slams into the Eurasian Plate. Over millions of years that collision has folded and faulted the earth into the Zagros range — a landscape of parallel ridges, deep valleys, and fractures that store strain until it slips. The geology of the region makes sizable, shallow earthquakes a recurring fact of life.

But geology alone did not write the worst parts of this story. In the villages and small towns near the border, construction practices varied wildly. Old adobe houses and unreinforced masonry stood beside more recent concrete buildings that, in many cases, were not built to withstand the kinds of shaking they endured. Enforcement of seismic building codes has long been inconsistent; economic pressures and scarce oversight left many structures vulnerable. When the 7.3 rupture arrived, weak points in walls and roofs became fatal failures.

Seventeen seconds that splintered villages

Seconds are a strange currency in an earthquake. In some places the shaking lasted less than half a minute; in that time entire houses collapsed. In the epicentral area — within tens of kilometers of Ezgeleh — whole neighborhoods were pulverized. Sarpol-e Zahab, a city of narrow streets and low buildings, was among the hardest hit. Hospitals, schools, shops, and homes were badly damaged or destroyed. In outlying hamlets, entire families were trapped beneath rubble.

After the mainshock, dozens of aftershocks — some strong enough to collapse weakened buildings — followed through the night and into the next days. The cold autumn weather, and snow on higher ground, intensified the hardship. People who had survived the shaking spent the night wrapped in blankets on roadsides and in parks, clustered around small fires or huddled in cars and tents. The psychological toll — people sleepless and jumpy at every rumble — was immediate and raw.

Where strangers became rescuers: the first chaotic hours

In the earliest hours, rescue was local and improvisational. Neighbors pulled people from wreckage with bare hands. Local clinics and hospitals groaned under the inflow of the injured. Provincial emergency teams, the Iranian Red Crescent, volunteers, and security forces moved into a staggered response: triage in open spaces, field tents, and, where possible, airlift of critical patients. Roads choked with traffic and debris hampered movement to remote villages. In some spots, minor landslides and fallen boulders cut off access entirely for hours or days.

On both sides of the border the pattern was the same: survivors searching for loved ones, volunteer teams marking rubble where people were known to be trapped, and aid workers trying to sort priority needs in the dark. Medical teams worked around the clock. Temperatures dropped and the danger of hypothermia became as real as shattered bones.

Counting the dead, counting what was lost

In the days that followed, officials and international sources compiled grim tallies. Consolidated reports commonly cited a combined death toll across Iran and Iraq of roughly 630 people, with several thousand more injured. These numbers varied among initial statements and were refined as teams reached more remote villages and hospitals reconciled their admissions.

Property losses were immense for the small communities affected. Thousands of homes were damaged or rendered uninhabitable, public buildings and clinics needed repair or replacement, and livelihoods — especially those tied to agriculture and livestock — were disrupted. Early damage estimates placed direct losses on the order of hundreds of millions of US dollars, commonly reported near $200 million, with long-term economic costs reaching higher when lost incomes and reconstruction were taken into account. Animal losses, while reported locally and deeply felt by farming families, were not consolidated in the initial international summaries.

The machines and hands that came to help

Response was a patchwork of national, provincial, and local action. Iran deployed emergency services, military units helped clear roads and organize logistics, and the Iranian Red Crescent established field hospitals and shelter centers. International offers of assistance arrived, and coordination with Iraqi Kurdish authorities helped when the quake affected northeastern Iraq, where cities such as Erbil and Duhok felt strong shaking and rural communities suffered damage.

Tents, blankets, food, and medical supplies were distributed; mobile clinics moved into damaged towns. Over the following weeks, the focus shifted from immediate rescue to shelter, medical follow-up, restoration of utilities, and damage assessment. For many families the emergency shelter phase would last months; reconstruction for public infrastructure and housing stretched over years.

Why buildings fell: the anatomy of collapse

Seismologists and engineers converged on the hardest technical questions: why, in some cases, did newer concrete buildings fare poorly while in others older masonry crumbled? The explanations were multiple and intertwined. The shallow depth and strong ground motion concentrated damaging energy near the surface. Local ground conditions — soft soils in some valley floors — amplified shaking. Many older structures, built of unreinforced masonry, had little resistance to lateral forces. Some newer concrete buildings showed inadequate reinforcement or construction practices that did not meet seismic design intent.

What followed were field surveys and forensic studies. Patterns of failure revealed where code provisions had not been met, where connections between walls and roofs were weak, and where simple changes — better reinforcement, stronger ties, and attention to foundations — might have saved lives. But conducting retrofits and enforcing higher standards across a vast region requires political will, funding, and time.

A public reckoning — promises, investigations, and slow repairs

The earthquake provoked official scrutiny and public debate about construction quality and code enforcement. Local investigations were opened into construction practices where buildings had failed. Government agencies promised reconstruction aid and compensation for families and pledged to rebuild with stronger standards where possible.

Yet the response also showed the limits of emergency budgets and the friction of bureaucracy. Implementation varied by province, and for many survivors the rebuilding process was slow. NGOs, engineers, and seismologists continued to press for targeted retrofitting of critical facilities — hospitals, schools, and bridges — and for community-level preparedness programs that could reduce future losses.

What the quake left behind in the science of risk

Seismologists used the event and its aftershocks to refine models of regional fault geometry and seismic hazard. The distribution of aftershocks helped delineate where rupture occurred and how strain is distributed in the borderland faults. Those scientific insights are practical: they inform hazard maps, building code updates, and land-use planning that can save lives in future events.

But science alone cannot rebuild homes, restore small businesses, or return lost lives. The quake underscored a persistent truth: reducing earthquake risk requires both technical knowledge and the social structures to implement it — enforcement, funding, public education, and political attention that survives past the first wave of news coverage.

Years later: recovery that is measured in repairs and memories

In the months and years after November 12, 2017, reconstruction advanced unevenly. Some towns saw newly built homes and retrofits; others waited for funds or bureaucratic approvals. For survivors, recovery mixed physical repair with less visible work: rebuilding trust in buildings, finding ways to make livelihoods whole again, and living with the memory of that night.

The 2017 Kermanshah earthquake did not produce a single, tidy lesson. It produced many: the certainty that this tectonic frontier can generate powerful earthquakes; that construction quality and enforcement materially influence who lives and who dies; and that aid and rescue depend as much on local volunteers as on organized agencies. It left communities grieving and resilient, and it left engineers and policymakers with urgent tasks that are still, in many places, unfinished.

The earthquake remains a raw chapter in the lives of borderland residents — a night when the ground betrayed confidence and a longer struggle afterward to rebuild not just houses, but the fragile assurances that keep a town sleeping through another autumn night.