TEHRAN- Now electricity outage due to the last night earthquake has been reported in the country, an official with Iran’s Power Generation and Distribution Company (known as Tavanir) announced on Friday.

Masoud Sadeqi, the director general of Distribution Supervising Department of Tavanir, also said that electricity condition is stable in the country, Mehr news agency reported citing a report by Energy Ministry.

Visiting the electricity dispatching center of the country, the official announced that the operating teams of Tehran, Alborz, and Mazandaran Provinces have been in a state of readiness after the earthquake.

An earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale shook Tehran province early on Friday.

The earthquake occurred at 00:48 a.m. at a depth of 7 kilometers near the city of Damavand, 56km northeast of Tehran.

The tremor was felt in the surrounding provinces of Qom, Alborz, Mazandaran, and Zanjan.

Esmaeil Najjar, head of the Crisis Management Organization, said a 60-year-old man lost his life and 33 people were injured, of whom four have been hospitalized, IRNA reported.

The victim from Damavand suffered brain injury while fleeing home. 

Some residents in Damavand, Gilavand, Boom-e Hend, Roud-e Hend, Pardis, metropolis of Tehran and some other nearby cities spent night outdoors, fearing stronger aftershocks.

Iran sits on top of major tectonic plates and experiences frequent seismic activity. In 2003, a 6.6-magnitude quake in southeastern Iran decimated the ancient mud-brick city of Bam and killed at least 31,000 people.

The metropolis of Tehran also sits on two major faultlines.

Mehdi Zare, a renowned seismologist, says the frequent jolts across Iran are the result of "accumulated seismic energy” in the form of natural consecutive seismic events.

MA/MA