Gas Line Explosion Severs Armenia’s Energy Supply

The tiny republic of Armenia, shivering through its third straight winter of severe wartime fuel shortages, plunged deeper into darkness Saturday after an explosion in neighboring Georgia severed its only energy supply from the outside.

The explosion ruptured a gas pipeline in Marneuli, a rural district of Georgia populated mainly by Azerbaijanis. Armenians and Azerbaijanis are waging an undeclared war that has claimed more than 3,000 lives and created half a million refugees in the last four years.

A Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman, Maj. Alexander Duali, said the pipeline blew up Friday night. “So far we cannot say whether it was an act of sabotage or just a technical fault,” he said in a telephone interview.

Officials in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, said the gas cutoff deprived nearly all the landlocked country’s 3.4 million people of heat and light on a day when the thermometer dipped to zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Authorities later opened a dam to allow water from Lake Sevan, one of the world’s largest mountain lakes, to restart a hydroelectric plant that will keep bakeries, hospitals and other vital services operating while the pipeline is fixed, the Associated Press reported from Yerevan.

“We are on the verge of a terrible catastrophe,” said Eduard Kazaryan, an Armenian government spokesman reached by telephone from Moscow. “This winter is the hardest in many years. You can imagine how people must feel in their homes. The temperature in many apartments is not higher than five degrees above zero (centigrade, or 41 Fahrenheit).”

The Armenian government and legislative leadership met in emergency session, preparing an appeal to the world community for help.

“Our two biggest power stations are exhausting their strategic reserves of fuel,” Kazaryan said.

Armenia, which declared independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, has few energy resources of its own. Its only nuclear power station has been closed since a 1988 earthquake left the country dependent on natural gas pumped through two pipelines--one entering from Azerbaijan, the other from Georgia.

Two years ago Azerbaijan shut down the first pipeline, and halted many of Armenia’s other imports, because of fighting between the former Soviet republics.

Since then, central heating has been turned off in private apartments in Armenia, and electricity is supplied there only 12 hours a day.

Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan centers on Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave within Azerbaijan that is populated mostly by Armenians.