6 Found Alive 5 Weeks After Armenia Quake

Five weeks after an earthquake devastated Armenia, six people have been pulled alive from under the rubble of the shattered town of Leninakan, Soviet authorities announced Thursday.

The Soviet news agency Tass said in a dispatch from Yerevan, the capital of the Soviet republic of Armenia, that the six men were freed from the debris on Wednesday, 35 days after the magnitude 6.9 earthquake that devastated the republic. It said they survived on canned food.

The six were pulled from the rubble of a nine-story apartment building in Leninakan, which is near the border with Turkey and was one of the cities hit hardest by the quake.

A 50-year-old survivor named Aikaz Akopyan was quoted as saying that on Dec. 7, the day of the quake, he had asked five neighbors to help him carry two wooden kegs into the building’s basement.

“We were down there when we suddenly heard a terrible noise and the walls began to collapse,” Akopyan said. “I thought a war had started.”

He said that the six had plenty of food during the weeks they were trapped there because the basement was used to store smoked hams and jugs of pickles, stewed fruit and vegetables.

“Still, we used the food sparingly,” Akopyan was quoted as saying.

“We lost track of time completely,” he said. “But we did not doubt for a minute that we would be found and rescued.”

Tass said that one of the group, Karen Sarkisyan, had suffered a broken arm during the quake but that Akopyan, an electrician who is “well versed in the art of folk healing,” had massaged the arm to relieve the pain.

After their rescue, the six were taken to a hospital in Yerevan, where they were said to be in satisfactory condition.

A Tass photo showed Akopyan, with a heavy growth of beard, sitting in Yerevan’s Clinic No. 3, swathed in blankets.

It has been two weeks since the last survivor was pulled from the wreckage of the earthquake. The survivor, a woman, died the next day.

Foreigners Gone

Soviet authorities had decided that no more survivors were likely to be found, and more than 2,000 rescue workers from around the world had largely abandoned the search and left the area. Weeks ago, Soviet rescue workers were already beginning to agonize over the question of stopping the searches in favor of leveling the damaged buildings.

Soviet Television last Friday showed rows of damaged apartment buildings in Leninakan being dynamited as bulldozers cleared away the rubble. The foundation stone for a new apartment complex was erected on the rubble of the old buildings.

On Wednesday, Gennady I. Gerasimov, the spokesman for the Soviet Foreign Ministry, said that authorities have recovered 24,920 bodies from the rubble since the earthquake. Another 11,859 people were hospitalized, while 8,644 have been released after receiving treatment.

Gerasimov said 112,077 people have been relocated from the area of the disaster.

There have been estimates that as many as 55,000 people may have died in the quake, with the remainder buried under the wreckage of buildings.

In the last two weeks, there have been frequent reports of survivors being found alive, but each time the government has denied them, blaming Western news agencies for exaggeration.

The last survivor pulled from the rubble of the Mexico City earthquakes in September, 1985, was a weeks-old infant trapped for nine days in the ruins of a hospital pediatric ward.

In recounting the 35-day ordeal, Akopyan said he was concerned that the other men might go “off their heads” because of their long confinement, so he entertained them with songs and stories from his life.

He said he felt especially lucky because in 1985 he suffered another near-fatal catastrophe--falling from a third floor while helping construct a building in Siberia.