Quake Victims Freezing Without Shelter : Thousands of Tents Arrive; Only a Few Have Reached Homeless

Survivors of the Armenian earthquake are freezing to death at night because only a fraction of the thousands of tents sent to the disaster area reach the homeless, a Soviet newspaper reported today.

Rescuers struggled to haul heavy equipment into the disaster area and evacuate victims, despite roads jammed with grieving relatives, a mountain snowstorm and temperatures that dropped below zero.

The Foreign Ministry today put the official death toll from the Dec. 7 quake at 55,000 and the number of injured to 13,000 but said that could change.

Hope dwindled for those trapped in the ruins, and the smell of decaying corpses filled the air. Rescuers have pulled 18,500 people from the wreckage in the last four days, but only 5,400 people were alive, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told reporters today in Moscow.

Newspaper accounts made it clear that despite the outpouring of international aid, Armenians were suffering from lack of basic shelter and medical care.

“In the corridor of a hospital, a man ran about, clutching the tiny body of a child to his breast, crying, ‘Please, help me!’ ” said the newspaper Socialisticheska Industria, in an article that also told how doctors were pressed into service building temporary housing.

The youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said 60,000 tents have been sent to the disaster area, but most of the 500,000 homeless are shivering around bonfires in the ruins.

“The collapsed villages are suffering especially from the disaster,” the newspaper said, citing helicopter Capt. Sergei Bobylev. In one village 20 children died in the quake and “now survivors are dying from cold,” the newspaper said.

Only two roads and one railroad are open to the mountainous disaster area, hindering delivery of cranes and bulldozers. The labor newspaper Trud reported evacuees cut off by a snowstorm. Many supplies are arriving by helicopter and parachute.

“Our nation is so undeveloped we can’t even receive help properly,” said one unidentified air traffic controller on the verge of tears at the airport in Yerevan, the Armenian capital 50 miles to the southeast of the disaster area.

In hard-hit Leninakan, once a city of 250,000, the remaining residents were beginning to suffer from the lack of drinking water, sewage and garbage-hauling facilities, and transport, said Sovietskaya Rossiya.

The newspaper said it was understandable that officials responsible for such services were in a state of shock, “as practically everyone lost families,” but the lack of action could not continue.