by Thomas Burns, Caucasus Regional Office

On December 1, 1988, six seismic sensory stations in northern Armenia recorded an earthquake that registered 3.5 on the Richter scale. Five days later, following a long sequence of minor tremors, the underground water level near Noyemberyan jumped two hundred centimeters¾ ten times the normal fluctuation and a sure sign of increasing seismic activity. Armenia was not prepared for what followed.

At 10:40 a.m. on December 7, 1988, an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.1 ripped through Armenia’s northern region. In Spitak, the city closest to the epicenter, not a building remained standing. Neighboring Gyumri, the country’s second largest city, saw comparable damage. More than 25,000 people perished. The material destruction was extensive enough that today, after more than a decade, 17,500 families are still living in the metal truck containers originally intended for temporary housing.

The total absence of an emergency response plan in Gyumri led to pandemonium in the tremor’s wake. Municipal services were at a complete loss: police didn’t know to blockade streets to allow the passage of rescue vehicles; water and electrical utilities were non-functional; and hospitals and morgues overflowed with corpses. "It was chaos," recalls one Gyumri resident, "and nobody knew what to do. When the first bus-loads of foreign rescue workers arrived and asked where to go, no one could answer them."

Armenia is a high-risk seismic zone, and another earthquake is inevitable. "No one can predict an earthquake with one hundred percent accuracy," explains Sergei Nazaretian, director of Armenia’s Northern Department of the National Service for Seismic Protection. "We can, however, make well-informed guesses and prepare for the unavoidable. What occurred in the aftermath of the Spitak quake can be prevented."

Determined to prepare the region for the next round, Nazaretian approached the Eurasia Foundation in 1996 with a proposal to create a model response plan for each of Gyumri’s twelve municipal services. The project, which received funding in the form of a $20,000 grant, involved the formulation of detailed city maps showing key emergency locations in Gyumri¾ from hospitals, to fire stations, to electrical and water sources¾ as well as the areas of the city at greatest risk. Indispensable in coordinating the response strategies of Gyumri’s city agencies, these maps also assisted the Northern Department in training 317 city personnel responsible for putting the emergency action plans into practice.

When the next quake hits Armenia, these plans will save lives¾ ten to fifteen percent of previously projected casualties, by Nazaretian’s estimates. Still, the lack of emergency plans remains a problem for cities throughout the entire region, not just Gyumri. All of Transcaucasia is seismically active and each city suffers from the same Soviet legacy of artificially deflated risk statistics and inadequate foresight in city planning. Earthquakes such as the 1991 tremor in Rachin, Georgia, have demonstrated that profound negligence concerning the region’s active fault lines has been a principal cause of earthquake deaths not only in Gyumri, but in the territory as a whole.

Building on the strategies developed for Gyumri, the Northern Department employed a second Eurasia grant in 1998—this time for $48,000—to devise response methodologies for the three capital cities of the South Caucasus: Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan. Working closely with analogous organizations in Georgia and Azerbaijan, the Northern Department created a series of analytical maps similar to those formulated for Gyumri.

Flipping through table-size diagrams of each municipality, Nazaretian is quick to point out weaknesses sure to cause problems in the event of an earthquake. "1500 of Yerevan’s residential buildings will crumble immediately when hit by a major earthquake, Baku will have significant problems obtaining water, and the wooden buildings in Tbilisi’s old town constitute an extreme fire hazard. All three cities are prone to considerable, and to a large degree preventable, earthquake damage."

Comprehensive in scope, these plans are already making the transition from paper to practice. All three cities have officially accepted and begun implementing the methodology developed by the Northern Department and local affiliates, and new structural codes have been established to ensure that all new buildings conform to seismic safety standards.

In addition to their applicability within the NIS, twenty-five percent of which is seismically active, these preparatory and response plans may be introduced internationally to "at risk" countries along the borders of the former Soviet Union. In September 1998, Armenia’s Northern Department presented its work at a world seismology forum in Istanbul, and the response was enthusiastic. Soviet research in this field was rarely publicized internationally and conference participants¾ academics and professionals alike¾ took an active interest in the Northern Department’s work, which as a direct result of this conference will soon be published in Belgium.

The Northern Department’s progress in the field of earthquake preparedness and emergency response is remarkable. In October 1998, the United Nations selected the department to receive the "Sasakawa Disaster Prevention Award," granted annually to one organization from each continent for their contributions to disaster prevention, mitigation, and preparedness. Winners from around the world then submitted their work to an expert panel in Geneva for further ranking, where Armenia’s Northern Department was again recognized for its outstanding achievements and commitment to saving lives.

March 1999

This document (c) 2001, The Eurasia Foundation.
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