Over 300 people have been killed and hundreds more injured following a M7.5 earthquake in Afghanistan's north eastern Badakhshan province. The worst impacted major urban centre is Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's administrative capital of Peshawar, where several buildings collapsed. Risk specialists Red24 say communications across parts of the impacted area have been cut, making information difficult to verify.

“The M7.5 event in Hindu Kush occurred in a seismically active plate boundary zone situated in the northern part of the Indian Plate at a depth of 213 km, according to the USGS,” said Dr. Gerald Galgana, scientist at AIR Worldwide. “This region is a curved arc characterised by intense mountain building and deep seismic events along the northwestern part of the Tibetan Plateau, along the Pamir-Hindu Kush mountains of Tajikistan and northeastern Afghanistan. The immediate epicentral region is situated at the western part of this collision zone, where the crust is unusually thick from the superposition and excessive deformation of rocks from different converging tectonic affinities.”

According to AIR, the earthquake occurred in the mountainous, rural province of Badakhshan in northeastern, Afghanistan, and was felt in Pakistan, India, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Although the overall economic loss is not expected to be high, the earthquake caused devastating damage to the epicentral regions due to the poor construction of local buildings.

Further aftershocks are expected in the near-term, which may further exacerbate rescue and recovery operations and lead to additional disruptions to amenities such as water, electricity, telecommunications and transport services.

Because of exceedingly low penetration of insurance in the affected region, AIR’s catastrophe modellers do not expect significant insured losses from this event.

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