At 16:22 local time on 9 April 2013, a magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck the Gulf coast of southern Iran, its epicentre in the hills of Dashti county, Bushehr province, near the small towns of Kaki and Shonbeh. The rupture was shallow, only around 12 km down, so shaking at the surface was fierce for a moderate quake: mud-brick and unreinforced rural houses across some 92 villages cracked or collapsed, two villages were reported flattened, and landslides came down around Kaki. Around 37 people were killed and 850 hurt, most of the dead in Shonbeh and its surrounding district.
USGS's automated PAGER system read the event correctly, flashing orange rather than red, a regional disaster rather than a catastrophe. What lifted the quake onto the world's front pages was not its size but its address: the epicentre lay about 90 km from the Bushehr nuclear power plant, Iran's first nuclear-power station, then in the final stage of being brought online. The plant, engineered to withstand a magnitude-8 shock, reported no damage. The through-line is that magnitude is not the same as catastrophe, and neither is proximity to something frightening: a shallow M6.4 in a poor rural district killed dozens because the housing was weak, while the same quake beside a well-engineered reactor did nothing to it.