The highway's embankment failed, and though the site was repaired immediately, the resulting damage to the highway caused considerable delay in getting people and supplies into and out of the area following the disaster. In the final month of 1988, Armenia was struck by an earthquake that absolutely devastated the northern region of the country and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, throwing many into housing insecurity that's lasted over 30 years. A strike-slip component in the rupture meant that the blocks also moved laterally past each other, rather than just up or down. 10 DECEMBER 1988. Rescue work is currently still concentrating on finding any survivors, but hope is waning in Armenia which borders Turkey and Azerbaijan. Most bridges and tunnels and other public infrastructure withstood the earthquake but hospitals did not fare well. Although the Soviet Union had said that reconstruction should take roughly two years, by 1989, it was clear that reconstruction was going to take at least nine more years. The Armenian National Survey for Seismic Protection was founded in 1991, in addition to the Emergency Management Administration. The town had a population under 19,000, but after the earthquake, the town no longer existed. While foreign doctors did assist with the Chernobyl incident, the Soviet relief effort after the earthquake was augmented by the largest foreign cooperation since World War II. We need foreign assistanceand there is no doubt about thatbut our friends do not know the local conditions and propose things that cannot or should not be built in an earthquake-prone region. And with so many of the roads destroyed and blocked by rubble, by the time relief crews finally arrived, they were "too late to save many lives," per VAHS. 30th Anniversary of the Spitak Earthquake in Armenia - red cross chat economy of the region was also in shambles, Journal of Emergency and Internal Medicine, The Earthquake of Spitak, Armenia, and Its Socio-economic Implications, Nagorno-Karabakh's annexation referendum in 1988, past their expiry date and therefore unusable. 1988 Spitak Earthquake Database. As a result, there were few seismic hazard studies done in the region. In addition to government aid, American Armand Hammer, a philanthropist who headed Occidental Petroleum Corp., flew to Armenia on Dec. 10 with a planeload of medical supplies and a $1 million donation. On December 7, 1988, a magnitude 6.9 earthquake shook northwestern Armenia, and was followed four minutes later by a magnitude 5.8 aftershock. The Spitak earthquake: Healing through music three decades on PMID: 29513918 DOI: 10.1002/jts.22260 Abstract This population-based longitudinal study examined the rates and predictors of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among 725 differentially exposed survivors of the 1988 Spitak earthquake in Armenia, 23 years after the event. [15], The earthquake occurred along a known 60km (37mi) thrust fault striking parallel to the Caucasus range and dipping to the north-northeast. Factors positively associated with depression score included number of stressful life events (95% CI 0.33, 1.20), poor self-rated health (95% CI 2.45, 5.40), earthquake-related deaths in the family (95% CI 0.12, 3.80), and strong phobia and fear at baseline (95% CI 0.51, 2.96). Armenia is located on the Alpine-Himalayan belt, or the Alpide belt, which is a seismic belt that runs from the Alps to the Himalayas, formed out of the tectonic collision between the Eurasian Plate and the Arabian Plate, per Earth Magazine. The information provided on this page seeks to define how the GCMD Keywords From daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings and climate monitoring to fisheries management, coastal restoration and supporting marine commerce, NOAAs products and It began when a reverse fault slipped, pushing one crustal block up relative to the adjacent block. The tremors struck at 11:41am local time, and the buildings began to collapse almost instantly.. Spitak, which was at the epicenter of the earthquake, was almost entirely levelled in just 30 seconds. While Western media portrayed the Soviet relief operation as inadequate and reflective of the "wider failures of the Soviet system," international relief efforts can be considered to have been equally inadequate due to the non-compatible medical equipment and out-of-date medications supplied. The Spitak Earthquake DATA ONLINE: Collapse of an old stone masonry Armenian church near Leninakan. The Soviet estimate of the deaths in the Armenia Earthquake exceeds 25,000, but unofficial estimates put this figure at 2 to 3 times this number, making it one of the worst natural disasters of this century. Those of you who answered the appeal for help, who have assisted in the relief effort, and those who flew to the Soviet Union and sifted through the rubble, searching for life against all odds, carried with you a message from America. The strength of the earthquake. Officials acknowledged that the work to complete the rebuilding may take up to five years or longer, a supposition that more than doubled Gorbachev's estimate of two years. An earthquake registering 6.9 on the Richter scale hit the northern part of the Armenian Republic of the So- viet Union at 11:41 a.m. on 7 December 1988. The complex quake involved two or more ruptures on different fault planes. The Spitak (Armenia, USSR) Earthquake: Residential Building - PubMed In 1988, the Spitak magnitude-6.9 earthquake in Armenia took more than 25,000 lives. The flight also carried Robert Seiple (president of World Vision) and a UCLA doctor who had worked in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. 16 Between half-a-million and 700 000. Gorbachev set aside 5 billion rubles (about US$8 billion) in funds for a start on what would likely be a recovery cost that would exceed the cleanup bill for the 1986 nuclear and radiation accident in Ukraine. More than 25,000 people were reported dead from the earthquake and 130,000 were left injured. Thirty years ago this month, on Dec. 7, 1988, a magnitude-6.8 earthquake shook the northern region of the then-Soviet republic of Armenia. Woman looks at her destroyed house, on December 11 in the devastated town of Spitak, after an earthquake hit Armenia, on December 7, 1988. The Spitak earthquake In 1988, a catastrophic earthquake struck Armenia with a death toll estimated to be over 25 000. Surface ruptures caused by the main shock were observed up to 13 kilometers from the epicenter, with vertical displacement averaging 1 meter but reaching as much as 1.6 meters in places. In support of the relief effort, recording artists united to produce several music-related contributions for the victims of the quake. Aftershocks continued in the area for months, some as large as magnitude 5.0. . Military troops were also dispatched by the Soviets, but since their training was in post-nuclear blast recovery efforts rather than earthquake relief, they were of little practical assistance. The Spitak earthquake, with a magnitude of up to 9 on the Richter scale, lasted barely half a minute, but that was long enough to destroy half of the Armenian SSR. In Gumri, one of the most devastated cities, 7% of the 250,000 population died, and approximately 50% of the city was destroyed. Today's Earthquakes Today's Earthquakes; Big Quakes; Places LA and Southern California; . Over 80% of the five-story buildings and over 85% of the nine-story buildings collapsed as a result. The intensity of the earthquake in Spitak was X 'Devastating' on the Medvedyev-Sponheuer-Karnik-64 scale, with a death toll of 17% of the population; in Gumri it was IX-X 'Destructive', with. According to EVN Report, in Leninakan, 18,000 people were found in the ruins, "out of which 8,000 survived." A quarter-century later, A.A. Nikonov (2003) generalized . The tapes were then played back and the P-wave and S-wave arrival times were used to automatically determine aftershock locations. A lack of cranes hindered rescue efforts in the days after the Armenian earthquake. Miller, Donald E. and Lorna Touryan Miller. The Americans donated generously as well, with Washington dispatching eight official planeloads of official relief aid plus a Lockheed C-141 Starlifter from Italy. Image credit: World Bank. But the region had no historic record of seismic events above magnitude 5.7 and thus it had received little attention in seismic hazard studies. Ultimately, the 1988 Spitak earthquake demonstrated the inadequacies of the entire international humanitarian system. For some, like Ara Tadevossian and his mother, there's a belief that it might have been tragically fortunate not to be rescued in the first few days, simply because everything had been destroyed and it might not have been possible to airlift people to safety earlier. However, as of 2020, thousands of peoplein the region still live in the temporary shelters provided in the aftermath of the earthquake. Meanwhile, Gorbachev's government tried to distract people by shifting the blame for the earthquake's destruction onto former leader Leonid Brezhnev rather than address its own shortcomings. Washington immediately responded with offers of doctors, medical equipment, and rescue teams, and by the first weekend the first US plane arrived in Yerevan with search and rescue teams and detection dogs. The engineers who scrutinized the damaged buildings and the rescue workers who had dismantled the buildings while extricating survivors ascribe both design shortcomings and improper construction methods for the failure of the buildings. [11][14], The source of the event was a fault rupture 40 kilometers (25mi) south of the Caucasus Mountains, a mountain range that has been produced by the convergence of the Arabian and the Eurasian tectonic plates. 514,000 people were left homeless. Spitak, a town of 25,000 inhabitants, has been completely destroyed and cannot be rebuilt - a new city will have to be built over the wreckage. [30] Nikolai Ryzhkov, the then Chairman of the Council of Ministers, was awarded the National Hero of Armenia for his work in rebuilding the city following the earthquake. As it would later be known, according to various estimates the final statistics of the death reached 38.000. Marrecca Fiore | February 13, 2020 In 1988, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck near the northern Armenian city of Spitak. Compared to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti which created roughly $7.8 billion in damages, the 1988 Spitak earthquake created $16.2 billion in damages. The earthquake hit 40% of the territory of Armenia, densely populated regions with 1 million people. On anniversary of Spitak earthquake, President Sarkissian calls for The unrest and the opposition movement began in September 1988 with negotiations between the Karabakh Committee and Gorbachev taking place throughout most of 1989. [35], The French arrived in Armenia in the late evening on Friday, December 9, and relieved the exhausted Armenian workers who then returned to Yerevan. The paper entitled "Predictors of permanent emigration in a long-term cohort of Spitak earthquake survivors in Armenia" is the most recent publication in the series of papers on the Post-earthquake Psychopathological Investigation (PEPSI) longitudinal study, which followed a cohort of survivors of the 1988 Spitak earthquake for over two decades. And although the Red Cross implemented training for emergency-response techniques and first-aid skills in the region, residents in the region are dismissive of these measures, claiming that compared to another earthquake, "unemployment and poverty are more terrifying.". By mid-January it was clear that Spitak, the epicenter of the earthquake, "will never rise again on its present site." A local official called the city the Armenian Pompeii. 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