The Gissar valley in Tajikistan is, in fact, one continuous village, in which there are adyrs - hills made of loess loam. To build them up with multi-storey buildings - and the problem of housing construction would be solved. Moreover, in such a picturesque area: all in greenery, in bloom - you can't take your eyes off!
But in January 1989, a natural disaster occurred here, which claimed hundreds of lives. First, an earthquake of about six points covered an area of more than 2100 square kilometers. However, this was not the most terrible thing for people and buildings. The tremors caused giant landslides, one of which (about two kilometers wide) fell off the hill and covered the southern part of the Sharora village. Another, in the form of liquid clay lava, descended from the opposite slope and reached the villages of Okuli-Bolo and Okuli-Poen. The rescue operations were complicated by the abundant discharge of groundwater on the surface of the earth.
Geologist N. Novgorodtsev, who was one of the first to arrive at the crash site, later admitted that at first he was very surprised by newspaper reports. Judging by them, it was difficult to understand why such a powerful landslide descended from the hill, barely reaching a hundred-meter height, that it covered "a huge cotton field to the horizon."
The Urtaboz plateau, where this natural disaster took place, is a flat oval hill with an area of more than thirty square kilometers. On the plateau about thirty years ago, oilmen drilled eight deep, up to two thousand meters, wells, but later they did not develop them.
Local experts argued that the cause of the disaster lay in the ill-conceived human intervention in the course of natural processes on the waterless lands of the Urtaboz plateau. By the way, this name is translated as “Waterless desert in the middle”. But at the foot of the plateau there are many different springs, some of them are even called "kainars" ("hot"). However, N. Novgorodtsev admits that he himself did not find any evidence of hydrothermal activity in the area. So it is likely that the landslides were caused by some other reason, although this version cannot be completely ruled out: the water temperature in the “Kainars” was three degrees higher than usual.
In the village of Okuli-Poyen, a stream of mud flooded the houses up to the attics. In places, only humpback loams remained on the surface, on which bushes and trees soon grew, the sod turned green. People are swarming nearby, trying to excavate their houses and get the necessary things. According to the former Afghan warrior M. Basidov, that night he could not sleep, and in general he was somehow alarmed.
“About twenty minutes to five, the earth began to shake easily - like a balloon on water. About five minutes passed, my brother's dog, who slept in my room that night, came to the door. As I understand now, she wanted to warn him, to save him: at first she barked, then she growled terribly. I got up, and then there was a blow. I thought something exploded. It shakes here often, but this time there was something wrong. People thought it was a meteorite. After the impact, everything lit up. I jumped out into the street like a bullet. It was still light, then it quickly got dark. I ran to my older brother to save the children. Soon the hum began to grow. My brother wanted to release the cattle, but the barn was gone. After the explosion, seven to eight minutes passed …
In the morning, when it was already quite light, I went up and touched the dirt. It was warm, 40 degrees. All residents noticed this, and some even said that the mud was still hot."
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Indeed, the villagers later said that a mud volcano erupted. Many recalled later that during the earthquake, accompanied by an explosion, all the surroundings were illuminated with a reddish light. After that, for a few more minutes, the noise of a strongly blazing fire was heard.
To investigate the causes of the disaster, a commission of hydrogeological specialists was created, which found that in one of the wells the level of liquefied mud rose by eight meters overnight.
Today, the southern part of the Sharora village at the foot of the steep slope of the Urtaboz plateau is nothing more than a huge mass grave, almost a kilometer long and two hundred meters wide. It is surrounded by a high blank fence, but on the side of the road in one place there is an opening. People come here in a continuous stream, sit down to the opening and pray …
The outer houses of the village were covered with liquid mud. She crawled into the rooms through windows and doors, and this is very clearly visible in the cemetery. However, huge pieces of asphalt from the highway that passed under the slope of the plateau were not covered by the landslide: they were at the very edge of the sliding mass, on the surface of the liquid mud. This means that this section of the road was swollen from below and moved several tens of meters.
On the slope of the plateau near Sharora, a landslide cut off the irrigation canal, but on the opposite, southwestern, side of the plateau, something completely different happened. It was not a landslide that came down here, but a powerful four-kilometer mud stream, which flooded an area of two million square meters. The mud was very fluid and mobile. Spreading along the Okulinskaya valley, it washed away the southeastern part of Okuli-Bolo village and reached the central part of Okuli-Poen village. Fortunately, people managed to leave this village in advance.
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev