Rescuers Race to Save Russian Quake Victims

The desperate cries and moans of trapped victims were heard from under slabs of crumpled concrete Monday as rescuers raced to free about 2,000 people buried in the rubble of their apartment buildings by Russia’s worst earthquake.

Russian television showed horrifying footage of a man, apparently pinned down under the ruins of his bed by concrete debris that covered his entire upper body, kicking his exposed legs feebly in a futile bid to extricate himself.

Survivors sat sobbing atop the shards that were the only remnants of Neftegorsk, a remote oil-producing town of 3,200 on Sakhalin Island in Russia’s Far East that was flattened early Sunday by a 7.5-magnitude quake.

As of Monday evening, only 938 of the 3,200 residents of Neftegorsk were known to be alive, including 238 injured people pulled from the rubble. At least 100 of the survivors were in critical condition, and doctors said many victims would require amputation of arms or legs. The unofficial death toll rose to about 500.

Apart from a few dozen people who were vacationing or away on business, the remaining population of the town was presumed buried, dead or alive.

With temperatures dropping below freezing at night, rescuers feared that few of the entombed could survive much beyond today. Minister of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu said he expects the death toll in Neftegorsk to reach at least 2,000.

President Boris N. Yeltsin asked for updates on the situation every 30 minutes and promised to address the nation about the disaster today. His chief of staff announced that the June 12 celebrations of Russian Independence Day will be canceled as a sign of respect for the victims.

Japan and South Korea both offered condolences and humanitarian aid to the victims of the Sakhalin quake. Russian officials said they were grateful for the offers but gave conflicting signals Monday about what kind of foreign aid will be accepted.

As the dimensions of the disaster became clear Monday, Russian officials and seismologists said that shoddy construction, budget cuts and indifference to seismic safety had probably increased the loss of life from the quake.

A senior official in the Ministry of Emergency Situations, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Neftegorsk’s buildings were thrown up hastily in the late 1960s to house workers migrating to the oil-rich island. He said the apartment houses were not built to seismic standards, although many areas in the region are known to be earthquake-prone.

“The buildings that collapsed in Neftegorsk were totally identical to the ones that were destroyed by the earthquake in Leninakan [now Kumayri] in 1988,” the official said, referring to the convulsion in then-Soviet Armenia that killed 25,000 people.

Cheap and haphazard Soviet-style construction was blamed for the exceedingly high death toll in the Armenian quake. Particularly vulnerable were the despised “Khrushchoby,” the inferior five-story buildings named after former Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, who commissioned thousands of the structures in the 1960s to house the masses.

In Armenia, huge numbers of the Khrushchoby and other postwar buildings collapsed, leaving more than 1 million people homeless.

In Neftegorsk, according to journalists on the scene, not one of the town’s 17 five-story Khrushchoby was left standing. Witnesses said the buildings collapsed within a minute. One woman said her apartment vaporized so fast that she awoke from sleep to find herself falling--and realized only when she was in midair that there must have been an earthquake.

In addition to the apartments, stores, offices and communal buildings destroyed, an elementary school was damaged. Fires burned across town for a second day Monday.

“If the buildings had been built in compliance with seismic construction norms, they would not have collapsed like cardboard boxes,” the official of the emergency ministry said.

Six early-warning stations had been set up on Sakhalin in hopes of detecting foreshocks in time to warn residents of an impending earthquake. All but one of the stations were shut a year ago because of budget cuts, said Gennady Sobolev, director of the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Seismology.

The only remaining monitoring station was located more than 300 miles away on the southern end of the island, so far from the epicenter as to be useless, Sobolev told Ostankino Television.

Sobolev said earthquakes of this size are typically followed by strong aftershocks but that Sakhalin had suffered only two relatively weak tremors, the larger a magnitude 4.8, in the two days since the quake.

“This is a sign that another major shock--if not several--could still happen,” he warned.

Another prominent seismologist, Alexei V. Nikolayev, speculated that extensive oil extraction on Sakhalin might have contributed to the seismic instability. The island, about 3,800 miles east of Moscow, produces about 1.5 million tons of oil a year.

The temblor ruptured a 60-mile section of oil pipeline in 15 places and damaged several oil wells. The pipeline has been shut off, but although the extent of the spill is not yet known, government and oil company executives said Monday that the damage was not significant.

Fleets of aircraft brought doctors, equipment and humanitarian aid to Sakhalin from all over eastern Russia on Monday. Road and bridge damage left Neftegorsk accessible only by helicopter, however, and a small armada of choppers worked steadily to ferry supplies in and the wounded out.

But survivors complained to Russian television that local officials, in the vintage Soviet tradition of hushing up disasters, had forbidden them to send telegrams to relatives on the grounds that this could create a panic.