"We will rebuild Bam, but this time more solidly," the country's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged on Monday after touring the town where an estimated 30,000 of the 100,000 inhabitants were killed.

In a message to the nation on Saturday, President Mohammad Khatami also announced that his government intended rebuilding the city.

In the meantime, rescue officials announced they would be building two camps on the outskirts of Bam to accomodate survivors.

"One hundred percent of this town was destroyed. There isn't a wall standing that can still be used," Interior Minister Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari said Saturday after inspecting the city from the air.

But reconstruction will prove difficult.

"The town held some 15,000 private dwellings, in addition to official and public buildings. We will need a lot of money to rebuild everything," according to Mahmoud Zargar an Iranian architect who has taken part in such operations.

"We will have to destroy everything and start again from scratch. As in most of the country's medium-sized towns and villages, not only did houses in Bam not keep to anti-seismic norms, they didn't even have an outer frame and just collapsed like a deck of cards," he said.

"It's as if you unloaded a truck full of stones over someone's head. When there is an outer frame, a building might collapse but there are always some cavities left which allow people to survive for several days," according to the architect.

"Each house is about 100 square meters in surface. A square meter in this region works out at about 100 euros (124 dollars), which means that each house would cost about 10,000 euros (12,400 dollars). Just rebuilding private homes would cost 150 million euros (186 million dollars)," he said.

Considering the fact the average monthly wage hovers at between 100 and 150 euros, that is an enormous sum.

In similar cases in the past, the government has granted low interest loans to help people rebuild their homes. And two years ago, when a quake hit several villages in the northern Gazvin region, killing 200, the government granted each household nearly 1,000 euros (1,240 dollars) in addition to the low interest loan.

"A few days ago, a quake of similar magnitude struck Los Angeles, but there were only two dead because anti-seismic norms were kept to", the architect noted.

Experts fear most Iranian towns could meet with a similar fate as Bam if a quake were to strike.

Meanwhile, survivors in Bam will likely be spending a long winter in makeshift tent camps.

TERRA.WIRE