In 1952, a tragedy occurred on the Kuril Islands, which has never been equal in the 20th century. On the night of November 4-5, a terrible tsunami destroyed the city of Severo-Kurilsk and several nearby villages to the ground.
The exact death toll is still classified, but on the Memory Square in Severo-Kurilsk there is a monument with the names of those who were identified, 2,236 people.
Tsunami in the Kuriles: how it happened
On a cold November night, the inhabitants of the Soviet Severo-Kurilsk were awakened by tremors. The 7-point earthquake ended quickly, and people decided that was it.
In the Soviet Union in those years there were no warning systems for natural disasters, so absolutely no one was ready for what happened next. The first, eight-meter tsunami wave flooded houses located in the lowlands of the city. The second, fifteen-meter high, demolished everything and everyone in its path - houses, trucks, half-dressed people who fled to the hills … Those who did not die on the spot froze in the icy ocean water. The bodies were thrown to the ground throughout the winter, people were buried for several months.
In the diary of the head of the Kamchatka volcanological station of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Boris Piip, in December 1952, it was written: “… about 40 minutes after the first shock, two seismic sea waves came to Severo-Kurilsk … The radio station continuously transmitted SOS, but somehow stupidly, so that Petropavlovsk could not understand anything … . There is practically no trace of the city with a population of six thousand people, only a few buildings on the high-lying outskirts and two concrete structures - a stadium gate and a monument to the Hero of the Soviet Union, pilot Talalikhin.
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Together with Severo-Kurilsk, the islands of Paramushir and Shumshu, with a civilian population of 10,500 people and Soviet servicemen, the exact number of which is still not known, suffered. Local experts in local lore counted at least eight thousand dead. Miraculously, the surviving people were evacuated in early 1953.
During the tsunami, hundreds of soldiers and officers were killed. What remained of the settlements was not guarded in any way - as a result, looting began. From one of the departmental institutions they took away a safe with 270 thousand rubles, a huge amount of money at that time.
Causes of the tragedy in the Kuril Islands
Seismologists who studied the circumstances of the most powerful natural disaster say that the tragedy happened due to the geological features of the place: the eastern coast of the Kuril Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula is a zone of high tectonic activity. The so-called subduction area is located on the Kuriles - in other words, the friction of the oceanic and continental plates, due to which the most terrible earthquakes occur.
The Kuril Ridge, the Aleutian and Japanese Islands are the most endangered places. The speed of the oceanic plate here is about 10 cm a year, "creeping" under the mainland and friction provoke the largest earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis.
The highest waves that washed Severo-Kurilsk into the Pacific Ocean were the result of an earthquake in Kamchatka. The source was located under the seabed at a depth of 30 km, and as a result, the Kamchatka earthquake of 1952 surpassed the Ashgabat earthquake of 1948 in terms of the amount of energy released. It was the strongest earthquake in North Asia in the twentieth century.
After the Kuril tragedy, in 1956, the Soviet government ordered the creation of a tsunami prevention service in the USSR, which is still operating in Russia.