Word: spitak
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Soviet officials have estimated that the quake killed 40,000 to 55,000 people in the cities of Leninakan, Spitak and Kirovakan and in up to 100 villages...
Sakharov's delegation visited Baku, Yerevan and Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, the Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that has been at the heart of the ethnic clashes that have been rocking the Soviet Union since February. He also stopped in Spitak, the town virtually destroyed in the Dec. 7 earthquake that the Kremlin now estimates took 25,000 lives...
With hope fading that any survivors remained buried in the rubble, many of the doctors, rescue squads, fire fighters and dog handlers who had converged on the ravaged cities of Leninakan and Spitak from around the globe began to head home last week. Ryzhkov, who spent 13 days in the area as head of a special Politburo commission supervising the relief efforts, offered a grim tally before he returned to Moscow. The number of dead, he reported, was certain to exceed 55,000. Relief workers had rescued 15,300, while 514,000 had been left homeless by the quake...
Dazed survivors of Spitak last week began trying to rebuild their lives from what remained of the town: piles of stone and wood and shattered belongings. Men, their faces hairy with a week's growth of beard, aimlessly wandered streets littered with scraps of clothing, pieces of furniture and broken dishes. Women with colorful head scarves plodded along, carrying heavy bundles of clothing salvaged from the wreckage; some carried buckets of water from distribution trucks. Most people lived in military tents, but Manuel Lambaryan and seven friends stayed in a makeshift hut built from the beams of his crumpled house...
Last Friday a green loudspeaker truck patrolled Spitak, urging all women and children to leave the town. In clipped Armenian, the voice assured residents that they would be sent to trade-union vacation centers in Georgia and the Crimea. Officials said about 38,000 people had been evacuated from the entire earthquake-damaged region and up to 70,000 were expected to leave. But many women in Spitak and other devastated communities refused to go, preferring to keep vigil by the still entombed bodies of their loved ones. "Why should we leave?" asked an elderly woman in Spitak. "This...