Soviet Quake Toll May Hit 100,000, Official Says

Thousands of soldiers Friday hunted for survivors buried in the ruins of towns leveled by an earthquake that racked Soviet Armenia and may have killed what one official estimated to be 100,000 people. Nearly half a million others were homeless.

The devastation, among the worst caused by an earthquake anywhere in the world in this century, sparked a monumental relief effort, with medical teams, rescue experts and supplies rushed in from the United States, Britain and Italy.

In the town of Spitak, seven of eight schools were flattened while the children were attending classes.

Nearly 700,000 people lived in the area hit by the temblor on Wednesday.

Supplies Flown In

Eighty Soviet jumbo jets flew 14,000 tons of medical supplies and equipment into the region, and volunteers in Moscow donated blood around the clock.

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who cut short a trip to New York and canceled trips to Cuba and Britain to help his countrymen cope with one of the Soviet Union’s worst disasters, was to go to the Armenian capital of Yerevan to supervise the relief effort. A government spokesman could not say when.

In its first official report on casualties, the Soviet government said, “Thousands were killed, tens of thousands injured and hundreds of thousands left homeless (in) the strongest quake in Transcaucasia on record.” The Caucasus Mountains are in the Armenian region.

Soviet officials said it was too early to determine how many people were killed when the earth moved under the Soviet-Turkish border area at mid-morning Wednesday, burying children in classrooms and workers in factories. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at 6.9.

High Death Toll

Rudolf Khochanov, an Armenian Foreign Ministry representative in Moscow, said the death toll from the quake “could be 50,000, 70,000 or even 100,000.”

A toll that high would make the earthquake the worst in Soviet history and the worst worldwide since a 1976 quake in China that reportedly killed 242,000 people.

Vladimir Dubinyak, the Interior Ministry chief of staff, said 7,000 troops were in quake-hit areas with the “sole mission to save people and give them essential aid.”

The troops--already in the region to deal with months of ethnic unrest--carried out their search despite aftershocks, falling debris, cut-off roads, broken bridges and a lack of communications.

The temblor, centered near the town of Spitak between Leninakan and Kirovakan--Armenia’s second- and third-largest cities--”struck a territory with a population of over 700,000,” said a statement by the Communist Party Central Committee and the Presidium of the National Parliament.

The hardest-hit towns were Leninakan, Spitak, Kirovakan and Stepanavan, the statement said.

“Leninakan and Kirovakan are 50% destroyed,” Khochanov said. The two cities have a combined population of 450,000.

International Red Cross officials said that Leninakan was 80% destroyed and that Spitak, 50 miles north of Yerevan, was “flattened.” The Sotsialisticheskaya Industria newspaper said at least 5,000 of Spitak’s 20,000 residents were killed.

‘Spitak Does Not Exist’

Two correspondents for Sotsialisticheskaya Industria drove into Spitak amid darkness and reported, “When the headlights of our car showed only a bumpy field, we understood the worst was too weak a description--Spitak does not exist anymore.”

Another reporter for the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said, “People with dead-like faces are sitting along the former streets on bundles. The streets and alleys are crowded with people who came to help.”

Newspaper reports said 6,200 soldiers were ordered to Spitak to search for victims. Soviet soldiers already were in the region because of ongoing ethnic violence over control of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh--located in the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan.

Sotsialisticheskaya Industria said rescuers were haunted by the cries for help from a little girl they were unable to reach in the mangled debris of a building.

Aided by Copters

The wounded and dead reportedly were being carried to a sports stadium where helicopters lifted off every 15 minutes to ferry the injured to hospitals.

About 200 survivors were rescued from the rubble in Leninakan, where Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov led a visit by a special Politburo task force.

Gorbachev, meanwhile, returned Friday morning after a hasty departure Thursday from New York, where he addressed the United Nations.

Lack of Information

“As soon as he arrived in Moscow before dawn, officials were at the airport to meet him with an emergency report on the situation,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Vadim Perfilyev told reporters.

But Lev Voznesensky, head of the Soviet Council of Ministers information department, said getting accurate information was difficult.

“We simply have not had the experience in modern times of coping with the information,” he said. “This disaster is of such proportion, it is extremely difficult for us to provide accurate information.”

The Soviet Union’s allies and ideological adversaries offered help.

Workers Donate Money

A plane of supplies from Bulgaria landed in Armenia Friday. The Polish government pledged tents, sleeping bags, bandages and medicine. Factory workers donated money.

Muscovites donated money at their workplaces, and 12,000 volunteers worked on disaster relief in Yerevan.

France dispatched planes to Yerevan carrying doctors, search dogs and medical supplies; Switzerland sent rescuers and more dogs; Britain pledged $9.3 million in aid and helped with specially trained firefighters.

The American Red Cross collected money, antibiotics and supplies, and the Soviet Embassy in Washington said it has been overwhelmed with telephone calls and with people who are “walking up to the doors of the embassy with checks and money orders.”

‘We Need Blood’

“The main thing is blood. We need transfusion blood,” said Igor Denisov, deputy health minister.