Up to 50,000 Killed in 6.9 Armenian Quake : Some Buried Alive; Soviet Cities Leveled

Soviet authorities rushed military surgeons and tons of medical supplies Thursday into Armenia, rocked by an earthquake that officials said virtually destroyed several cities and killed tens of thousands of people.

Thousands, some still alive and calling for help, were buried under heaps of debris. Armenia, gripped by ethnic unrest for most of this year, took the brunt of the Wednesday quake, which was felt in neighboring Turkey and Iran. The temblor, which also hit the neighboring republics of Azerbaijan and Georgia, was the worst in the region in 80 years, the Tass news agency said.

Armenian journalists said a Politburo commission led by Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov received preliminary estimates that up to 50,000 people died in the quake, which was measured at magnitude 6.9. Soviet officials reported that thousands of people were killed but provided no official death toll.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev cut short his trip to the United States and flew home to lead a worldwide emergency rescue effort in the southern republic, which has a population of 3.5 million. Gorbachev, who canceled visits to Cuba and Britain, arrived in Moscow and planned to fly to Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

President Reagan offered emergency humanitarian aid, Cuban President Fidel Castro pledged to send construction workers and Britain dispatched London firefighters to join the rescue effort.

Soviet television showed a clock on a building in the city of Leninakan, near the Turkish border and about 50 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, stopped at 11:41 a.m.--the time the disaster struck.

Leninakan Largely Destroyed

The earthquake destroyed two-thirds of Leninakan, Armenia’s second-largest city with a population of 250,000 people, a TV correspondent said.

Spitak, a town of 16,000 about 30 miles away, “was practically erased from the face of the Earth,” the correspondent said. Hundreds of thousands were left homeless in the region, he said.

Tass said half the buildings in Kirovakan, a city of 150,000, had collapsed.

A Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter said the quake knocked down nearly every high-rise building in Leninakan, including hospitals and schools.

“As soon as I felt (the quake) I ran to the street to find my children and my wife and mother,” a cabdriver named Artur Kasyan told the newspaper. “I found my wife, Karina, with our child, Ophelia, in her arms. Now I am trying to find my mother.”

On Leninakan’s Gorky Street, at Elementary School No. 9, “The earthquake killed children on the spot during their classes,” the paper reported. Police Sgt. Valery Gumenyok said his men pulled 50 children’s bodies out of the rubble.

The paper described people roaming through the crumbled streets in shock, “as if they had no idea of the scale of the tragedy or of what had happened to them.”

A special meeting of representatives of all 15 Soviet republics was called today in Yerevan to discuss disaster relief.

Soviet authorities dispatched doctors, engineers and food and medical supplies to the area, and a “helicopter bridge” was set up to ferry the injured northward to hospitals in neighboring Soviet Georgia, the Tass news agency reported.

Soldiers Search Rubble

Tass said 2,300 people were hospitalized in Yerevan with injuries from the quake and that 200 had been hospitalized across the border in Georgia. It did not say how many of the injured were treated elsewhere.

For a second night Thursday, millions of Soviet TV viewers saw soldiers searching for survivors and bodies in huge piles of concrete rubble, either by hand or with cranes. The disaster coverage by the state-run media was unprecedented in its speed and scope.

Ryzhkov, head of an earthquake commission, told Soviet television the main task before authorities is to search the rubble for the injured and dead.

He then turned directly toward the camera and made an unusual appeal to factory and business officials nationwide not to wait to be asked but to start immediately to send heavy cranes, helicopters and other equipment to the stricken area.

Today and Saturday were declared days of mourning in Armenia.

Soviet television and Komsomolskaya Pravda reported from Leninakan that preliminary estimates were that tens of thousands of people were killed.

Health Minister Yevgeny I. Chazov reportedly spoke of 50,000 deaths in a meeting Thursday in Yerevan, and church officials in Armenia told fellow churchmen in New York that an estimated 70,000 were killed.

“It’s going to be a while before anyone knows how many people are dead, but with so many buildings destroyed in major cities it won’t be at all surprising if there are more than 100,000 dead,” said Arsholye Papazyan, a scholar at the Institute for Oriental Studies in Yerevan. Western diplomats in Moscow agreed that the death count could rise to 100,000 in the coming days.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Vadim Perfiliev said authorities were having difficulty calculating the death toll because communications with the region were severed.

He said the Foreign Ministry was reviewing requests by foreign reporters to visit the disaster area, but that none had been approved.

Soldiers were setting up tent cities to house evacuees in the devastated regions, and restoring electricity and water supplies, army Gen. Vladimir Arkhipov told Tass. Bonfires burned in the shattered cities to warm the homeless in the December chill.

The newspaper Izvestia reported that the population of Armenia had risen markedly in recent weeks as people fled violent ethnic strife between Armenians, who are mostly Christians, and predominantly Muslim Azerbaijanis.

About 180,000 refugees reportedly have fled across the border between the two republics in the last three weeks.