Ashgabat earthquake in 1948
| Ashgabat earthquake in 1948 | |||
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| Coordinates | 37 ° 57 ′ 0 ″ N , 58 ° 19 ′ 12 ″ E | ||
| date | October 5, 1948 UTC | ||
| Time | 20:12:07 UTC | ||
| Magnitude | 7.3 M S | ||
| depth | 18 km | ||
| epicenter | Ashgabat | ||
| country | Soviet Union | ||
| dead | at least 110,000 | ||
The Ashgabat earthquake on October 6, 1948 was a natural disaster in the Soviet Union . It had its epicenter near the center of Ashgabat city and occurred at 1:12 a.m. local time at night . It claimed tens of thousands of lives and practically destroyed the entire city.
198,000 people lived in the capital of the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic at that time. Most were asleep when the earthquake hit the ground in the middle of the night. Due to its proximity to the epicenter, the tremor in Ashgabat reached an intensity of IX – X on the Modified Mercalli scale . Almost all adobe houses in the city collapsed, and reinforced concrete buildings were badly damaged. Water pipes burst, and cracks up to 60 centimeters wide and hundreds of meters long appeared in the ground. In the station, freight trains were thrown from the tracks and overturned.
Dmitri Naliwkin experienced the quake and reported several aftershocks in the first hours after the main quake.
Serious damage also occurred in the Iranian administrative district of Dargaz .
Under Stalin's rule , the strength of the earthquake was downplayed and the number of deaths was given in the first reports as 10,000. There was no international disaster relief. In 1988 the number of victims was corrected to 110,000 dead. In 2007, a Turkmen state agency reported that 176,000 people were said to have died in the quake. The number of injuries is unknown.
In the center of the rebuilt city, a memorial to the victims of the earthquake was erected at the Halk Hakydasy memorial complex . October 6th is a national day off in Turkmenistan.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Significant Earthquake. NOAA , accessed September 26, 2017 .
- ^ Paul Schmelzeis: Eyewitness Account. In: sites.google.com. March 2014, accessed on November 14, 2017 .
- ↑ Kristin Stevens: Ashgabat Earthquake (1948) . In: K. Bradley Penuel, Matt Statler (Eds.): Encyclopedia of Disaster Relief . tape 2 . SAGE Publications, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4129-7101-0 , pp. 19 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
- ↑ H. Hasanov: Over 176,000 people suffered earthquake in Ashgabat in 1948. In: en.trend.az. October 7, 2009, accessed November 14, 2017 .