Rescuers Race Clock as Soviet Quake Toll Rises

MOSCOW — Rescue efforts intensified Friday in the southern Soviet republic of Armenia, where as many as 100,000 people are now feared to have died in a devastating earthquake three days ago.

As tremors continued to shake the region, rescue teams dug frantically around the clock in the rubble of more than a dozen cities and towns, searching for survivors trapped in the ruins of hundreds of thousands of buildings.

“We still have people screaming from beneath the ruins,” government spokesman Lev Voznesensky said, “but every hour those screams become quieter.”

200 Workers Rescued

At one factory, soldiers pulled 200 workers alive from beneath the building’s fallen walls and collapsed roof, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass.

“Helpless, sobbing people are climbing on the ruins of an apartment house from which heart-rending cries for help can be heard,” correspondents from the Communist Party newspaper Pravda reported from Leninakan, one of the most severely damaged cities.

Concerned that other survivors are still trapped, the special commission established by the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo to deal with the emergency ordered that rescue efforts be stepped up immediately.

“Every minute counts when it comes to saving the living and retrieving the bodies of the dead,” the commission said in a communique Friday night.

The United States was readying a plane Friday night to fly rescue specialists, search dogs and medical equipment to the scene, U.S. and Soviet officials announced in Washington.

Although the Soviet government has not yet given precise casualty figures for the earthquake, the death toll may be as high as 100,000, according to a spokesman for Armenia’s official Armenpress news agency.

Firsthand reports from the hardest-hit areas indicate that the devastation is even worse than first thought, the spokesman said, adding that in some places the survivors are outnumbered by the dead.

“In the region of Spitak, which had a population of more than 55,000, there was almost no one left alive,” he said, quoting a report by an Armenpress correspondent who visited Spitak.

More than 80% of Armenia’s second city, Leninakan, which had a population of more than 200,000, was destroyed, according to a government communique, and the cities of Kirovakan and Stepanavan and the Akhuryansky district also were devastated.

Soviet television broadcast aerial views of Spitak, which seemed bereft of life, and of Leninakan, much of which appeared to have been reduced to rubble.

The national television news program “Vremya” showed rescue workers digging through still-smoking piles of concrete and twisted metal, often working with their hands because of a shortage of cranes and bulldozers. More than 500 cranes are to be sent from around the country on the Politburo’s orders.

Rescue Teams, Dogs Arrive

More troops and equipment are being airlifted to the area today, and British, French and Swiss mine rescue teams, some aided by dogs trained to search for people buried in rubble, arrived Friday afternoon to help.

“It is only after clearing the debris and rescuing those who might still be alive and after burying the dead,” the Politburo commission said, “that it will be possible to start energetic evacuation of people from the affected cities and villages, as well as doing plan-based work to restore and repair buildings and supply lines.”

Meanwhile, a major airlift was begun to carry food, medicine, blankets, clothing, tents and other supplies to care for the survivors.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who cut short a trip to New York because of the disaster, met immediately with members of the special commission on his return to Moscow on Friday, and he is expected to visit the area this weekend with Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, who is overseeing the massive rescue effort.

Amid the national relief effort, however, rioters in the neighboring Soviet republic of Azerbaijan were reported to have set fire to about 10 Armenian houses in the capital, Baku, after troops who had been guarding the Armenian quarter there were redeployed to help in the rescue operations.

The Armenpress spokesman said five planeloads of refugees arrived in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, from Baku on Thursday and Friday with stories of renewed communal strife there.

In Baku, an Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesman said there had been some “illegal actions” and that the city’s military commander intervened to restore order. The government newspaper Izvestia published a front-page article Friday evening condemning unidentified people for “using these tragic conditions for excessive provocations.”

At least 31 people were killed in recent weeks in clashes in Armenia and Azerbaijan before troops, imposing emergency rule, managed to halt the ethnic violence.

90 Died in Hospital

The Armenpress spokesman said that many of those taken out of the quake’s destruction were too badly injured to survive. For example, 90 of those taken to a major hospital in Yerevan died overnight.

The magnitude 6.9 earthquake was the strongest on record for the Soviet Transcaucasian region.

The government declared today a day of mourning, ordering all flags to be flown at half-staff and all public entertainment canceled.

At least 400,000 of the survivors are homeless, according to a preliminary government survey reported by Tass. But the total figure may be four or five times that when adjacent areas of Azerbaijan and Georgia, where the damage was also heavy but the casualties fewer, are included.

The Politburo commission, reviewing the initial rescue efforts, sharply criticized government agencies for their slowness in rehousing the refugees in temporary shelters and in establishing a food distribution system. The commission ordered immediate steps to correct the situation.

The commission, dispatching several more regiments of army engineers into the area, made the reopening of roads, railways and airfields a top priority in order to aid the evacuation of refugees, speed the flow of relief supplies and begin the reconstruction effort.

Relief planes from around the country began ferrying in tons of emergency supplies and equipment, landing at Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport every few minutes.

Moscow authorities sent a ton of blood by air, and other medical supplies, blankets and clothes have come from throughout the country. Large quantities of food are to be airlifted over the weekend in a fleet of 80 transport planes assigned to around-the-clock duty.

Mobile electric power generators have been brought in by army engineers. Construction companies are preparing thousands of cranes, bulldozers, trucks and other pieces of heavy equipment for shipment to the area. Moscow alone will have a trainload of equipment ready to leave over the weekend.

More than 550 physicians have arrived in Yerevan from around the country, according to Tass, and 10 military field hospitals have been established in the stricken region. Yevgeny I. Chazov, the health minister, is leading the medical force in Yerevan.

Supplies also arrived Friday from Britain, Bulgaria, France, Finland and Switzerland, with further flights expected today from Italy, Japan, Norway and West Germany in the first international relief effort after a natural disaster in the Soviet Union in recent decades.

France alone sent two military transports with 165 medical personnel and specialists in rescue operations. Twenty British mine rescue specialists, who assisted in digging out people trapped in the September, 1985, Mexico City earthquake, were sent by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

At the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Minister-Counselor Yevgeny Kutovoy told a news conference that the embassy staff has been deluged with offers of aid and that the first shipment is expected to come from the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance.

Kutovoy, who is acting chief of mission in the absence of Ambassador Yuri V. Dubinin, said he met Friday afternoon with Julia V. Taft, director of the disaster assistance office of the Agency for International Development, and she informed him that a chartered plane is being readied to fly rescue specialists, trained search dogs and medical equipment directly to Yerevan.

He said the Soviet government is grateful that U.S. and other foreign medical personnel have volunteered help but that the primary requirement is for disposable syringes, first-aid equipment, blood transfusion systems, bone reconstructive surgery devices, ultra-sound diagnostic equipment, portable dialysis machines and pediatric medical equipment.

In addition to the U.S. government plane carrying rescue specialists, dogs to sniff out buried victims and essential medical equipment, Kutovoy said Moscow is preparing to authorize similar flights by private organizations and individuals.

He said several Armenian organizations in the United States have volunteered assistance. Asked if he had received any communication from Gov. George Deukmejian of California, the state with the most U.S. earthquake expertise, he said he had not.

“I have talked with Armand Hammer, who offered his sympathy and assistance,” he said, referring to the Los Angeles industrialist who has had a close connection with Soviet leaders for half a century.

Kutovoy said the embassy telephone lines have been swamped, and he is ordering special lines set up to take care of disaster relief communications.

Cuba is readying a special construction team to go to the quake region to help with the resettlement effort. Because of the risk of spreading AIDS in the country, blood donations are not being accepted from abroad, and blood donors, who are coming by the hundreds to blood banks in major Soviet cities, are being screened to see whether they are carriers of the AIDS virus.

Times staff writer Don Shannon, in Washington, contributed to this story.