50 Die in Floods, Landslides in Soviet Georgia

Landslides and flooding in a mountainous region of Soviet Georgia killed more than 50 people and destroyed hundreds of houses Wednesday night, Soviet television reported Thursday.

The television showed wrecked buildings in a sea of mud, rocks and melting snow, with rescue teams picking through the shattered remains for survivors in the Adzharia region, close to the Soviet border with Turkey.

It said 52 people had been caught in the deluge which had hit the village of Tsablana. Five bodies had been recovered.

The official news agency Tass earlier reported that one landslide had formed a 350-foot high natural dam across the Charukha River, causing it to flood.

“Four houses were submerged by the water. According to preliminary estimates, more than 30 people were inside. Only five were pulled from the water, one of whom died later,” Tass said.

It said a bus carrying more than 20 people had also been caught in the flood. After several hours of searching, no survivors had been found.

Tass said about 700 people had been evacuated from the region after a series of landslides, avalanches and floods caused by rapidly melting snow. More than 500 houses had been destroyed or seriously damaged. Hospitals, schools and office buildings had also been destroyed as well as large sections of roads, the agency said.

It was the second time in recent months that a period of ethnic unrest in Soviet Transcaucasia had been followed by a natural disaster.

Twenty people were killed earlier this month in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, when troops used a what the government described as a concentrated form of tear gas, clubs and military entrenching shovels to break up a nationalist demonstration. Some officials in Georgia had charged that the soldiers used nerve gas but this was denied Thursday by the Foreign Ministry.

Last December, an earthquake killed 25,000 people in the neighboring republic of Armenia, which had been involved in a territorial conflict with another Caucasian republic, Azerbaijan, for 10 months. That dispute, over Armenian claims to the Azerbaijani region of Nagorno-Karabakh, had taken the lives of more than 90 people in ethnic clashes in the two republics.