Bitterness Surfaces in Town Leveled by Russian Quake

Vladimir Sarychev was working in his potato garden in the early hours of Sunday, having sent his pregnant wife inside to bathe and check on their sleeping 2-year-old daughter.

“Suddenly, the earth trembled, and immediately the whole village was covered with a huge cloud of dust,” the 25-year-old truck driver recalled. “There was a short silence, and then hundreds of voices were screaming and moaning for help.”

Somehow, Sarychev reached into the rubble of the burning apartment building and found his wife’s hand, but she was trapped. She burned to death before his eyes.

His daughter and both parents were also among the still-uncounted hundreds who perished in Russia’s deadliest earthquake--one that leveled all 17 apartment blocks in this Far Eastern oil village and all but wiped the town off the map.

Officials today said that they had recovered 379 dead from the rubble so far, including 39 children. Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s minister of emergency situations, said 375 injured people have been rescued. Officials fear that up to 2,000 of the 3,200 people who lived in the town are dead.

The 7.5-magnitude quake, which was centered offshore less than 20 miles south of here, struck at 1:03 a.m. Sunday.

Some people survived falling ceilings that crushed spouses sleeping next to them. Aftershocks killed some trapped survivors while giving others openings to escape. Many of the living perished, but the village’s monument to Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union, was unscathed by the temblor.

As rescue workers with cranes, floodlights, bulldozers and dogs combed mountains of rubble for survivors early today, the lucky ones who escaped found human fault in the tragedy. Sarychev and others said there had been no organized effort for at least 24 hours after the disaster.

“There wasn’t even a fire brigade,” Sarychev said bitterly, sitting by a bonfire with his head buried in his burned and bandaged hands. “For a whole day there was nobody, nobody, nobody.”

The delay in rescue work was partly because of the remoteness of the disaster. The quake occurred off Sakhalin, a Pacific island about which playwright Anton Chekhov wrote a century ago: “This seems to be the end of the world.”

President Boris N. Yeltsin, who declared today a day of mourning, said Tuesday that he had dispatched rescue workers and equipment immediately after the quake and that they had arrived “without delay.”

But Russian officials said the bulldozers, cranes and other heavy equipment rushed to Sakhalin from the mainland were stalled Sunday because the quake had damaged the railroad and blocked three highway bridges.

“You could hear people crying for help from under the rubble, but there were no cranes available, and after a while the cries would stop,” said Philippe Remarque, a reporter for a Dutch newspaper who was in the Far East when the quake occurred and arrived here Sunday.

The disaster pointed to a serious fault of Soviet history as well as geography: the hasty, shoddy construction of the village in the early 1960s.

“These houses were built on bottles of vodka; they drank, they did some work, and then they drank some more,” recalled Viktor Krepkov, a metalworker who was rescued from the rubble. “They picked people at random for the building brigade to rush the project through.”

Krepkov’s remark was laced with bitterness. His wife, two children and father-in-law were crushed to death in the quake.

Survivors said major cracks were visible in some external walls of the buildings even before the quake, and that one wall had collapsed outward a few weeks ago when a bulldozer rumbled by.

Construction workers said the quake exposed faulty welding of metal support rods inside the walls.

“Why did it take an earthquake to show our leaders that our houses were so poorly built?” asked Roman P. Korovin, whose two children are missing.

Shoigu said the Neftegorsk buildings were built to withstand quakes up to a magnitude of 3.0. But in 1979 the region was reclassified as seismically “dangerous.”

But Viktor D. Gurevich, the deputy governor of Sakhalin, said the buildings could have withstood a 5.0 quake.

“People were not removed from Neftegorsk after 1979 because a quake exceeding that was not expected,” he said.

Neftegorsk was laid out Soviet-style--in neat rows of identical five-story blocks, with 64 apartments each. The village, plopped down in a dirt field about three-quarters of a mile long and three-quarters of a mile wide, also had a school and a discotheque.

Today, each row of apartment blocks looks like a mountain range of rubble up to 30 feet high--a jumble of fallen concrete beams, twisted pipes, splintered floorboards, crumbling masonry, mattresses, clothing and books.

Among the household detritus from one block was a bloodstained pillow, a volume of Russian poetry, a Moody Blues album and the severed arm of a doll.

The buildings were so fragile that upper floors crashed directly onto lower floors in deadly succession, crushing people in between.

Most of the survivors landed in random pockets of safety. An 18-year-old girl who was taking a bath when the quake hit fell two stories but survived when the tub flipped over, forming a protective shield.

On Tuesday, Shoigu ordered the bulldozers and cranes to shut off their engines for two hours of silence--one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening--to enable rescue workers to hear voices crying for help.

It worked: 64 survivors were located, and all but five were pulled out. The number of silent periods was increased to three today.

One voice heard during Tuesday night’s silent hour was that of Alexandra Kozlova, the village’s veteran first-grade teacher, buried under two slabs of concrete that crushed her right leg and killed her husband. For more than nine hours, rescue workers labored with a crane, a power saw and their hands to free her, while trying to keep her spirits up.

“How old are you Alexandra?” the rescue team leader shouted through the rubble at one point in the running conversation.

“Fifty-seven,” she replied weakly.

“Oh, the prime of life!” the team leader said. “When we get you out, we will dance.”

Kozlova emerged pale and in shock from her ordeal, and a doctor at the nearby field hospital said she was “all but dead.”