The year 1976 was truly tragic in the history of earthquakes. According to the Bureau of Disaster Relief at the UN, during the twelve months of this year, 162 strong earthquakes occurred on the globe, of which 12 were large and three were giant.
It all began in Guatemala (one of the countries of Central America), which is literally cut in two, as it is located on the border between the North American and Caribbean seismic plates. The Motagua Fault, part of this plate boundary, stretches three hundred kilometers along it.
The earthquake, the focus of which was at a depth of ten kilometers, struck the capital of the country on February 4 at 3 hours 30 minutes local time. The tremors were accompanied by numerous landslides, since the plateau here is dissected by ravines with steep slopes. Horizontal soil displacement here reached three meters, resulting in cracks up to nine meters wide. The territory with a total area of up to nine thousand square kilometers was affected.
The strong shaking of the soil lasted only thirty seconds, but they caused terrible destruction and disaster. Most of the capital of the country, the city of Guatemala, suffered; many buildings were severely damaged in it, which were already built taking into account the seismic nature of the area. In dozens of villages and villages, adobe houses were almost completely destroyed. In some of them (for example, in the village of El Progresso, which is located in the center of the country) it was difficult to find even one surviving building. Broken phone lines and power grids, as well as damaged highways and collapsed bridges, isolated survivors from the rest of the country. Rescue and recovery operations were difficult to start due to thousands of landslides that occurred on the steep slopes formed by soft rocks.
After the displacement and fracture of the earth's crust in Guatemala, the eruption of three (of the many active!) Volcanoes began at once. The earthquake triggered a chain of new volcanoes along the Pacific coast.
The raging element claimed the lives of 22 thousand people, about eighty thousand were injured to one degree or another. A fifth of the country's population (more than one million people) was left homeless, without clothes, without food.
Only three months have passed since the Guatemalan earthquake, and the newspapers reported:
“The number of people killed in the earthquake that occurred on the night of May 7 in Italy and affected most of Europe, exceeded 900. The fate of hundreds of others is unknown. In Jemone, an entire street is razed to the ground. The remains of furniture, baby carriages, toys peep out from under the ruins … The first shock, estimated at 6.9 points, was felt in Berlin, Poland and the Yugoslav city of Sarajevo. Electronic sensors recorded that the famous "Leaning Tower" in Pisa swayed. This is the worst earthquake in Italy since 1932, when 1,425 people died east of Naples.”
Promotional video:
The stopped hands of the clock in the Uzbek village of Gazli showed the exact time when the earth shook here. It was 7 hours 58 minutes 33 seconds on the morning of May 17, 1976. The earthquake lasted a little over a minute, but it turned out to be enough to destroy almost everything. The strength of the tremor reached nine points. The epicenter of the underground storm was located seventy kilometers from Gazli, in the foothills of the Kuldzhuktau ridge, where the power of the earthquake was close to ten points.
Residents say: a low, rolling rumble escaped from the depths of the earth, reminding old front-line soldiers of the sounds of a distant artillery cannonade. The sky suddenly darkened, swung and flew towards the horizon. Houses began to crumble with a crash, trees fell. A huge cloud of dust shot up over the village hundreds of meters up …
I must say that this time the elements were still merciful to people. She seemed to warn about herself in advance: the first earth vibrations occurred here on April 8. Many houses were destroyed in Gazli then. People were warned - they were waiting for new aftershocks, housed in tent camps, in light prefabricated houses. And when an earthquake, much stronger, struck the village for the second time, there were almost no human casualties.
In Bukhara, the strength of the aftershocks reached seven points, in Tashkent - five.
Alarming messages came that day from many places: Mary, Chardzhou, Tejen, Ashgabat, the Gissar valley, the Kulyab region … The underground bad weather covered three republics - Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan. In Bukhara, the old part of the city was seriously damaged. Fortunately, the architectural monuments survived.
On June 26, 1976, on the distant Pacific island of New Guinea, unprecedented landslides caused by an underground cataclysm buried thirty-seven villages and more than nine thousand people.
On July 14, 1976, tens of thousands of Bali residents became victims of a powerful earthquake, which turned into ruins the entire western part of this overpopulated island of the Indonesian archipelago, known throughout the world for its fabulous nature and ancient temples … Two tremors literally wiped out the island located on the northern coast of the island. the city of Seririt with a population of 50 thousand people."
In China in the summer of 1976, the earth was seized with convulsions for many days, the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. [2]
For the Philippines, the August 17, 1976 earthquake was the most devastating. Its epicenter was at sea. The ten-meter water wall, born of the shifts in the seabed, washed away from the coast more than one thousand huts of the islanders.
On November 24, 1976, the strongest tremors destroyed the Turkish city of Muradiye and about two hundred nearby villages to the ground, killing six thousand people.
All in all, in 1976 there were about fifty earthquakes causing death to people (for comparison: 1996 - 21 earthquakes with a magnitude of 7 points and higher, 1997 - 17). But the underground element did not calm down the next year either …
The evening of March 4, 1977 was remembered by many residents of Moscow: in many houses, at the same moment, chandeliers swayed, dishes rang in cupboards, walls swayed. Even furniture moved in high-rise buildings.
Then Muscovites learned that these were echoes of a distant earthquake. If they were so clearly heard in Moscow, then one can only imagine what was there where the earthquake happened …
Indeed, the disaster was difficult. In the center of the underground impact were the Danube regions of Romania and Bulgaria. Over the past hundred years, seismologists noted in those days, there has not been such a strong earthquake on the European continent.
More than one and a half thousand dead and over ten thousand wounded - these were the victims of the merciless elements. The capital of Romania suffered greatly. In Bucharest, many buildings in the city center could not withstand the tremors. From under the ruins of multi-storey buildings, rescuers retrieved the dead and wounded for a whole week.
So, in fact, the "year of earthquakes" ended, during which the underground element claimed, according to official data, more than half a million lives.
HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS. N. A. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev