Walter Rodgers: 100 miles away, the floor shook

CNN's Walter Rodgers

(CNN) -- Afghan officials said Tuesday that an accurate death count may be weeks away after a devastating earthquake in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan, where early reports indicated the town of Nahrin may have been destroyed.

Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, said that 1,800 people died in the magnitude 6 quake, but other officials said the number could be as high as 4,000. Thousands more were injured, and an estimated 30,000 homes were destroyed in a remote region.

CNN Correspondent Walter Rodgers is in Kabul, some 100 miles south of where those quakes hit, and filed this report:

RODGERS: The earthquake hit Kabul last night about 8:45 in the evening local time. I was sitting at a desk. I felt the desk and the floor start shaking. I knew instantly what it was and said to my colleagues, 'hey, we're in an earthquake.' I moved to a door jamb quickly because that's the safest place to be.

In Kabul, it was relatively mild. However, it only lasted a few seconds. Nothing like the magnitude they're getting north of here about 200 kilometers in the Baglan province.

Now, Baglan is at the western end of the Hindu Kush. The capital of the province has reportedly been almost destroyed. Of course, relief agencies are in Afghanistan and they are speeding supplies to that area.

The initial reports from the United Nations said that 100 people had been killed. However, there was a serious upgrade of those estimates today, coming from the U.S. Embassy, where President Bush's special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, was holding a news conference and then he told everyone just how severe this quake was.

The defense ministry here in Kabul estimates 4,000 people were injured, 20,000 homes destroyed and the conditions, the statistics will only get worse because building construction in this part of the world is rudimentary at best -- mud bricks, adobe bricks, no foundations at all. The worst part of the tragedy, of course, is that it struck in the evening when most people were in their homes, so many homes would simply have collapsed on whole families inside.

We're told, of course, that the relief agencies are moving quickly to that area. The good news, of course, is that there are many relief agencies, United Nations, international and other agencies here, NGOs (non-governmental agencies), because everyone's trying to get Afghanistan on its feet. The bad news is the Afghan government itself has only been in operation for three months, so it was pretty well unprepared for all of this.

One footnote to this earthquake is, of course, the Baglan province is especially earthquake-prone. In 1998 there was another quake in this very area that killed 7,000 people.

I lived on the edge of the Afro-Syrian Rift, one of the most active earthquake zones, for five-and-a-half years and I went to school at the University of Washington in Seattle, and they know what earthquakes are in the United States.