Toll in Soviet Quake Rises to 100 Dead; 45 Villages Reported Destroyed : Disaster: About 500 are injured and 80,000 are reported homeless. The craggy terrain presents problems for rescue teams in remote areas.

Rescue teams dug barehanded through the ruins, the government of Soviet Georgia appealed for emergency help and the known death toll mounted to 100 on Tuesday in the wake of the most powerful earthquake to hit parts of the northern Caucasus Mountains in 800 years.

After a survey of the damage zone, Georgian officials said that 45 villages were destroyed by Monday’s earthquake, including one that was “totally buried.” An estimated 500 people were reported injured and 80,000 left homeless.

“We were surprised that with so many villages destroyed, so few people were killed,” said Archil Kostava, prefect of the Georgian city of Kutaisi, near the center of the earthquake zone. “But it came in the middle of the day, and people were out working in the fields.”

Kostava and spokesmen for the Georgian mission in Moscow put the death toll at 100, with at least 10 of the victims children. A less intense earthquake in Armenia killed 25,000 people and left half a million homeless in 1988.

The Georgian earthquake hit a less populated region of the volatile Caucasus chain. However, Kostava said, the craggy terrain creates problems for rescuers from Armenia, Moscow and abroad trying to reach near-inaccessible mountain villages.

“These are mountainous places. They are hard to get to, and there are no roads for the rescue equipment to travel on,” he said.

“We need help badly,” Kostava added.

Soviet television showed emergency workers clawing through house-high piles of wreckage and reported that 2,000 soldiers, mountain climbers and medics had rushed to the region. Officials scrambled to ship water, food and tents to the homeless and to ferry the injured to distant hospitals.

Georgia’s mission in Moscow appealed to a string of foreign embassies, hoping to receive even a fraction of the massive Western aid that flowed in for victims of the Armenian earthquake.

“We need medicine, blood, disposable needles, children’s food, tents, helicopters and construction materials,” said Marina Starostina, a spokeswoman for the Georgian mission.

The mission’s press secretary, Valerian Khukhunashvili, added that fuel supplies were also being sought for fear that the chronic Soviet shortage of gasoline would hamper rescue operations.

Representatives of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had already reached the earthquake zone and were due to report back to headquarters in Geneva on what supplies were needed most, Kostava said.

About 40 schools and six hospitals were reported destroyed, but Kostava said the greatest tragedy of the earthquake hit a village of about 70 people in the Sachkhere region.

“It was totally buried by a landslide,” Kostava said. “And only two people were saved because they happened to be far away. It was a terrible case.”

The village, Khakhieti, “has been wiped from the face of the earth,” Soviet television said.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev sent his condolences to relatives of the victims. The central government put aside its differences with Georgian nationalist leader Zviad Gamsakhurdia and asked him for instructions on how it could best help in the emergency.

The temblor destroyed factories, roads and power lines and brought down about 80% of the housing in several towns. Kostava estimated that the damage would amount to 300 million rubles, roughly $525 million at the official rate of exchange.

According to Soviet seismologists, the earthquake registered a magnitude of 7.0 when it hit at 12:12 p.m. Monday, and a similar shock occurred just over nine hours later. On the Soviet 12-point scale, the shock registered nearly 8.

Soviet geophysicist Oleg Starovoit told the daily newspaper Izvestia that quakes of such tremendous power are a rarity in the Caucasus.

“According to historical data, the last earthquake of an 8-point intensity here happened about 800 years ago,” Starovoit told Izvestia. “But this area is not a ‘blank spot’ for seismologists--underground activity here is usual.”

The initial quake was centered near the village of Dzhava in Southern Ossetia. More than 100 people have been killed in the region in recent months from fighting between Georgians and Ossetians.

Even though the earthquake left victims on both sides of the ethnic conflict, the disaster apparently failed to stem the bloody Georgian-Ossetian violence.

The state-run Tass news agency reported Tuesday that five Ossetians were killed in a prolonged skirmish in a Southern Ossetian village. It also said that the earthquake’s deprivations will compound the difficulties--shortages of food, medicine and fuel--in the Southern Ossetian city of Tzkhinvali.

Transporting emergency supplies to the quake zone may also be complicated by a rail blockade that Georgia began 20 days ago to protest Moscow’s deployment of troops in the region to quell the ethnic conflicts.