Word: spitak
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shaken violently by a rumble from the earth. Concrete and stone snapped like brittle twigs, hospitals and schools crashed down on patients and children, and workers were entombed in factories. Within minutes the city was split apart like an accordion. Forty-five miles to the north, the town of Spitak, population 30,000, was virtually "erased from the face of the earth," in the words of a Soviet television commentator. Said a local news-agency editor: "Ninety-nine percent of the population is gone...
...world scene of people huddled around bonfires, and roads out of the city clogged with fleeing residents. As workers tried to clear away fallen masonry, "you could hear the terrible cries of people waiting for help," wrote a reporter for Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. In devastated Spitak, a correspondent for Sotsialisticheskaya Industriya said, rescue workers heard a small girl trapped under a pile of rubble cry for her mother and ask for water. They lowered a pipe for her to drink through, but were unable to free...
Gorbachev and his wife Raisa were shown consoling survivors and speaking with rescuers in Spitak, a city of 16,000 that was virtually destroyed by the quake, and in Kirovakan 10 miles east...