Eurokinissi/ THE ASSOCIATED PRESS A paramedic rescues a girl from a collapsed building in the Athens, Greece, suburb of Menidi. A deadly earthquake struck the Greek capital yesterday.

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Rescue teams and stunned residents used everything from cranes to garden tools yesterday to dig for those pinned under wreckage from the strongest earthquake to hit Athens in nearly a century - a 10-second shudder that claimed at least 30 lives and left close to 100 missing.

The scenes of desperate searches and survivors too frightened to return indoors were sadly familiar -last month's monstrous quake in neighboring Turkey had moved many Greeks to put aside their historical enmity with Turks and mobilize aid.

But some significant differences came to light in the shared disasters.

Decades of progressively stricter building codes in Greece allowed Athens to ride out the 5.9-magnitude quake with much less misery than western Turkey, where shoddy construction was blamed for the near total destruction of some places after the 7.4-magnitude quake on Aug. 17.

"Damage like we saw in Turkey is difficult to occur here with the modern buildings we have," said Manolis Skordilis, head of the Thessaloniki Seismological Institute.

Most of the damage and casualties were concentrated in working-class and immigrant areas north of Athens, where construction standards were apparently lower or builders used shortcuts, some officials suggested. More than 100 buildings collapsed, from multistory apartment houses to factories, and hundreds more were left with cracks or crumbled facades.

State television reported at least 30 people dead, including several children. Most of the victims were crushed; a few suffered fatal heart attacks.

The exact number missing was unclear, but state media said about two dozen people were trapped in flattened apartment buildings. An estimated 40 workers were missing in a collapsed foam products factory north of Athens, and about a dozen employees were reported under the rubble of an appliance maker.

In central Athens, there was no apparent damage to ancient sites, including the Acropolis and the towering columns of the Temple of Zeus.

But streets throughout the capital of more than 5 million people were littered with signs of the quake's power: chunks of concrete, glass shards and shattered marble that rained down on people who raced from offices and homes in the middle of the work day. Hundreds of people were hurt by falling debris, police said.

Some women dashed out of beauty salons, their hair still wet. Workers bolted from their offices and retirees poured into the streets in slippers or stocking feet. People punched in vain at cellular phones trying to make calls on overcrowded networks. Others tried to get to public telephones, or huddled around radios at sidewalk kiosks.

A series of aftershocks - as strong as 4.5 - swayed buildings and kept people from going back indoors even as night fell. Many Athenians have ancestral homes in other parts in the nation and have memories of devastating quakes.

Civil defense officials erected tents and provided aid to people refusing to return home. Some gathered in a central Athens park, where an evening concert was planned to help the victims of the quake in Turkey, which claimed more than 15,000 lives.

Relief aid from countries including France, Russia, Turkey and the Czech Republic was en route, said government spokesman Dimitris Reppas.

The strongest quake in the Athens area this century was of magnitude 6 in 1914, said Vasilis Papzahos, one of the leading earthquake experts in the region.

The Athens Seismological Institute said the latest quake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.9 and was centered about 12 miles north of Athens. The epicenter was between Menidi and Mount Parnes, which is a national park and sparsely inhabited.

"Everyone panicked, especially because of the recent Turkish quake," said Dimitris Lalas, head of the institute.

The U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 5.8 centered about 15 miles northwest of Athens.

Seismologists said there was no clear connection with the Turkish quake. Still, "we can say there is increased earthquake activity in the eastern Mediterranean," said Skordilis.

Greece has a long history of powerful and deadly quakes.

In 1995, a 6.1-magnitude quake killed 26 people in Aegio, about 120 miles southwest of Athens. The deadliest quake in Greece in recent decades was a 6.5-magnitude temblor in 1978 in the northern port of Thessaloniki that killed 45 people.

Since a strong 1981 earthquake felt in Athens, most buildings in the capital have been built and reinforced to withstand quakes.