American On Island During Sakhalin Quake

Michael Allen, of Crescent, Iowa works on Sakhalin Island. He was one of the few Americans (or foreigners, for that matter) on there when the devastating earthquake destroyed the island’s northern city of Neftegorsk on May 28, claiming over 1,800 lives. What follows is his powerful firsthand account of the events on the island surrounding the quake. When the quake hit, he was attending a graduation party for some of his Junior Achievement students.

I didn’t actually feel the tremor, though it was only 100 kilometers away, on the other side of the island, because the music was loud and the party lively at the discotheque in Aleksandrovsk-Sakhalinsky. Our only notice came from anxious parents who had felt the shock, and came pounding at the door in slippers to see that their children were safe. They were.

The kids happily waved them off and the high-school graduation party wound down in the wee hours of Sunday, May 28, as such parties did that night in recreation centers in little towns all across Sakhalin.

Except Neftegorsk.

Only one student from the Neftegorsk class of 1995 would be left to try and live out the promising futures dreamed of in valedictorian speeches.

We didn’t realize the magnitude of the tragedy in Neftegorsk until the next morning. On the bus to Tyrnovskoye two ladies sat on suitcases in the aisle, peppering the sketchy radio reports: nineteen killed, some buildings down.

With little or no faith in underfunded Russian rescue services, the two ladies had intrepidly set off for Neftegorsk to find their relatives after the phone lines went dead.

Sakhalin's rescue team had by that time arrived: in all nine men, with little or no heavy equipment. Rescue teams en route from Petropavlovsk and Moscow would not arrive for another day or more. They joined the few survivors who clawed frantically at tons of block and concrete with bare, bloody hands to free family and friends in the wreckage, trying to shut out the screams from a few smoldering apartment blocks where gas had ignited.

Arriving in Tymovskoye, we learned the jolt had been strong enough there to awaken everyone in town. Friends said they lay in bed not quite sure what to do until they heard voices in the street, where the next apartment block over, the one with mostly construction workers' families, had evacuated without delay. It seemed prudent to follow suit. People stood around in the chilly moonlight for a few hours, one by one giving up the vigil and going back to bed.

When I returned to the capital. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, where I work as a community relations and Junior Achievement consultant for the multinational oil consortium Sakhalin Energy, the phone was already ringing.

It soon became clear this was a major disaster. My parents were frantic with worry after hearing the first CNN broadcasts misreporting that “the city of Sakhalin” was devastated by a major quake. Hotels were full of foreign correspondents looking for any available air transport to Neftegorsk (the bridges on both sides of the town had been washed out months ago and there has been no money to repair them).

As the scope of the tragedy unfolded, we kept in touch with events through phone calls to sources in the Emergency Committee, which met in standing session at the Administration Building across the street.

Every morning the first order of business was to read the dreadful numbers: how many dead, how many saved... and how many children. How rescuers labored to free survivors, only to have them expire suddenly like candles when the crushing weight was lifted.

Every morning came reminders of the critical need for immediate cash transfusions from Moscow. And every morning the expectation of an official announcement of Yeltsin’s impending Visit.

There was a curious new-found efficiency in it all, as if the earthquake that took twelve lives in the Kuriles last October were only a dress-rehearsal for this one.

In a matter of only a few hours, the Emergency Committee had announced account numbers for hard currency donations. This amid hopes voiced that new funds would not go astray.

It was a sad twist of fate that, at the time of the quake, a commission of auditors from Moscow was on Sakhalin investigating why more than half the promised 530 billion rubles for Kuriles earthquake relief is still unaccounted for, why fifteen hundred families still await aid.

In our office, co-workers gathered informally and discussed the latest reports, the latest rumors, with hushed sadness and occasional tears. When the power went out (due to lack of funds), the bosses gathered in knots in the darkened corridor to discuss monetary aid and wild talk of ecological damage from leaking oil pipelines.

We organized a blood drive, and I learned that Russians believe giving blood exacerbates near-sightedness. Doctors won’t draw from those who wear -4.0 power lenses or greater. I said I ’ d never heard of such a thing in America, to which they replied that, well, that's why so many people in America wear glasses.

I heard the frequent grumble of cargo aircraft, probably aid shipments landing at the airport. We watched the news and waited for word of a Yeltsin visit to Neftegorsk; but heard only that he had sniped at the Japanese for trying to use aid to leverage their way onto the Kuriles [Russia and Japan have had a dispute over possession of the Kuriles since the end of WWII, when Russia took the over islands. ‐ Ed.].

I remembered how Father Arkady, in a black cassock and long white beard, had thundered against the insult of “humanitarian” aid during his May 9 Victory Day speech here. The speech was met with wild applause from a local audience that is fiercely proud of Russia and her ability to solve her own problems.

At the English club meeting later that week, an oil company seismologist was the featured speaker. He dismissed rumors that intensive drilling had contributed to the tragedy: the epicenter was deep, much deeper than what drilling can penetrate. He likened such rumors to blaming a mosquito bite for bone cancer.

Interestingly, the seismologist said that, prior to May 28, the maximum magnitude forecast for an earthquake in Sakhalin was 5.5 on the Richter scale. That was before the 7.5 quake in Neftegorsk.

It became clear during the question and answer period that Russians are chilled by the sight of Neftegorsk in ruins in a way no Westerner can understand. Housing here is standardized: “Khrushchyovkas” built in the late fifties, “Brezhnyovkas” built in the late sixties. Everybody knows somebody who lives in houses just like the ones in Neftegorsk. Everybody knows that construction foremen back then sold materials “on the left” and leavened concrete with extra sand, or cut corners to meet a Five-Year Plan deadline.

A lot of people spoke of going to live in shacks in the country, or with relatives on the mainland over the summer. But they know that, when winter comes, they’ll have to return to work, that they will have to look up during sleepless nights at the concrete ceilings that could plummet down upon them in their sleep.

“Why don’t you just move off this island?” asked one foreign correspondent.

Move? Where? The Soviet Union was not a mobile society. Housing still technically belongs to the State, and the barter value of Sakhalin apartments has plummeted in the complicated three- and four-way swaps that have arisen in place of a free housing market. The best solution is to move in with relatives somewhere on the mainland, until (if) a job and housing can be found.

Those who can are doing just that. This seems to suit Moscow fine. There is a much-discussed policy to give up on infrastructure improvements here and let the island revert to a “watch method" economy, where workers leave families on the mainland to come six weeks on, six weeks off to work the island’s timber, coal, and oil resources.

This is part of the reason why Neftegorsk will be covered up and not rebuilt, and why teachers haven’t been paid their $100 a month salaries since February (no money). But they can get their back pay in f u l l if they move to the mainland.

The policy distresses native Sakhaliners like my friend Sofia, who is Japanese by birth but native Russian by culture and language. Her parents were denied repatriation by Japanese officials after World War II when suspicion arose that her father might actually be Korean.

On the return trip to Yuzhno‑Sakhalinsk she looked sadly from the coal-heated railway sleeper (that dates back to Imperial Japan) at the piles of rusting construction materials, scattered detritus, car bodies, abandoned tools and helter-skelter telephone lines (also dating to the Japanese era) that line the tracks.

“For all our history,” Sofia said, “this has been a place people come temporarily. They don’t stay. It used to be the prison island of the Tsars; then Stalin started paying people good wages to get them to work here after the Japanese left. They came, worked up a pile of money, and went back to their homes in the West [of Russia] when they were done.”

School is out. The new exodus has already begun. Some estimates have it that every tenth Sakhaliner will pack up and turn his back for good on the unlucky island this summer.

But there are many, like Sofia, who will stay. They are those who know this place as home, whose ancestors have lived here since Tsarist exile, or who came later and simply can't bring themselves to leave the salmon and the berries and the natural beauty of this foggy Pacific shore.

For these islanders, the future looks reasonably bright. There is hope of development fueled by oil revenues and opening borders to neighboring Asian countries. There is hope to find the money someday to upgrade seismic standards and infrastructure, to let Sakhalin live up to its promise.

We know now that we live in an earthquake-prone region, and we’ll have to make allowances like so many other of our neighbors on the Ring of Fire.

The only thing we need give up on is Yeltsin’s consolatory visit. He's not coming.