Tadzhikistan Quake Toll May Be Below 1,000, Soviet Aide Says

A senior Soviet official said Tuesday that the toll from an earthquake in Tadzhikistan a day earlier may be significantly lower than the 1,000 first reported, although the actual figure might never be known.

Gennady I. Gerasimov, chief of the Foreign Ministry information department, said at a news conference here that as many as one-third of those feared buried in mudslides triggered by the quake had managed to flee to nearby mountains before the wall of wet sand and clay reached their village.

In the republic’s capital of Dushanbe, 20 to 30 miles northeast of the tremor’s epicenter, Yuri Zemmel, head of the local office of the Novosti press agency, confirmed in a telephone interview that there are “indications that the overall number of dead may be less than 600 persons.”

Zemmel said authorities were working with their latest census figures Tuesday in an attempt to estimate how many people lie buried after mudslides struck two farming villages in the mountainous region.

According to Gerasimov, local authorities are considering whether to leave the remaining victims buried so as not to violate the traditions of the area’s mainly Muslim population. That would leave the exact toll forever uncertain.

The official Tass news agency reported from the quake area that “tents and shepherds’ traditional conical yurts now stand in place of solid peasant houses which were ruined by the tremors. Smoke from bonfires and field kitchens hang low over the villages of Sharora, Okulibolo, Okulipoyen, and Khisor, which were in the epicenter of the quake.”

Sharora and Okulibolo were the two villages hardest hit by the mudslides, which Gerasimov said caused most of the casualties.

The tremor was not as powerful as the devastating earthquake that killed 25,000 and left another half million homeless in Soviet Armenia last month. In Western terms, it was the rough equivalent of a magnitude 5.4 quake as opposed to the magnitude 6.9 quake that struck Armenia. But the Tadzhik quake was preceded by rains and wet snow that undermined the soil on the hillsides, and when the tremor struck, mud swept down on the villages in a wall up to 50 feet high.

Tass said more than 100 people have so far been pulled from the destruction, but only one of those was still alive.

Local officials quoted by Tass said they are having trouble organizing sufficient food and other supplies for the affected villages.