Horror in Armenia

The earthquake that struck Armenia Wednesday was centered in a region that was home to more than 700,000 people. Unofficial estimates say that as many as one in seven of that population may have died in a horror of collapsing homes, schools, hospitals and other public buildings. No one knows how many victims remain buried under the rubble. Soviet officials say that Spitak, the main town in a district of 55,000, was “wiped out,” and that in the larger cities of Leninakan and Kirovakan 50% of the structures were destroyed. It will be days, perhaps weeks, before accurate casualty lists can be compiled. According to Tass, the Soviet news agency, the quake has left perhaps 400,000 people homeless.

The Armenian disaster is being described in the Soviet Union as the strongest quake ever recorded in Transcaucasia. A quake with the same Richterscale magnitude of 6.9 in California would be destructive, but because of seismic-safety-dictated building codes the devastation and the death toll almost certainly would be only fractions of what they have been in Armenia. Rich nations can afford to build against natural catastrophe, however much their citizens may grumble at the cost. It’s no coincidence that the heaviest earthquake death tolls in the last half-century have occurred in poorer lands--China, Guatemala, Turkey and now the Soviet Union.

Much of the world is responding to the plight of the much-beset people of Armenia with generous offers of aid. An international airlift is rushing vital supplies to the stricken land. Private citizens who want to contribute to relief efforts are invited to do so through such organizations as American Red Cross International Disaster Relief.