The governmental budget allocated for maintaining residential areas at districts suffering from deteriorated fabric is insignificant, spokesman for Iranian parliament’s Construction Commission has warned.
130,000 hectares of public and residential areas in Iran are suffering from deficiency and urban decay, Fars news agency cited Sodeif Badri as saying.
The domain of areas with deficient and worn-out fabric in Iran is so vast that there is not enough budget to maintain and renovate them.
The minister of Roads and Urban Development, Abbas Akhoundi also said on Saturday, December 23, nineteen million people out of Iran’s +80 million population live in “shoddy homes” which is another term for residences in areas with deteriorated fabric.
Recent quakes in Iran, including a 5.2 magnitude that hit the capital, Tehran last Thursday, have once again forced media and the Islamic republic’s officials to focus on the urban infrastructure and level of resistance to earthquakes buildings have.
During the recent earthquake in Tehran, which several people said was a prelude to a much stronger one, traffic was disrupted in the capital streets and highways to the extent that emergency vehicles could hardly move.
Schools, universities, government offices and most of sports arenas were closed in Tehran, Alborz and Qom provinces on Thursday, December 21, reported the state television.
Meanwhile, long queues formed at the gas stations and many people spent the night outside their homes.
The epicenter of the quake was not far from Meshkin Dasht, which sits about 31 mile west of Tehran, the government’s official news agency IRNA said.
A strong earthquake in Tehran might destroy nearly 300,000 buildings and impact nearly one million people, the director of Ministry of Roads and Urban Development’s Department of Seismology has warned.
“Out of Tehran’s nearly 1,100,000 building blocks, 200,000 are located in areas with worn-out urban fabric” Ali Beytollahi noted.