Major Quake Does Minor Damage in Remote Russia

Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News

April 21, 2006

A major earthquake rocked Russia's Far East early this morning. The temblor appears to have generally spared the residents of the sparsely populated Koryak region located some 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) and eight time zones east of Moscow.

Local officials reported that 31 people were injured during the initial quake and several strong secondary quakes, but it appears that no one was killed.

"Of this number, seven have been hospitalized," a local emergency response official told RIA Novosti, the Russian News and Information Agency. The official stressed that emergency services personnel could not report final statistics until communications were restored to four remote villages.

The quake caused building and infrastructure damage to several schools and the Tilichiki airport, interrupted telephone service, and cut off power and water supplies in several villages.

Big Quakes Common, Usually Not Deadly

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Japan's Meteorological Agency estimated the Kamchatka Peninsula earthquake to be magnitude 7.7—similar in strength to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (estimate at 7.7 to 7.9) that leveled much of the city and killed at least 3,000 people a hundred years ago this week.

Quakes of such size are common. Fortunately, it is rare for them to cause many fatalities.

"We have [on average] 18 earthquakes per year above 7.0, and one of those is usually bigger than an 8.0. But we don't have 18 devastating quakes a year. There are usually only one or two per year that cause more than a few deaths," John Bellini, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, said.

"Most earthquakes occur in regions that are sparsely populated or in parts of the ocean that are not near any populations and don't cause tsunamis."

Historically, very deadly quakes are rare. USGS statistics show that the earliest known quake to result in 50,000 or more deaths took place in Damghan, Iran, in A.D. 856.

Since that time only 22 others are known to have claimed 50,000 or more lives. It is possible, though, that some killer quakes have been lost to history.

Despite humankind's relatively good fortune in avoiding killer quakes, many people are at risk, because they dwell in geological hot spots.

"It tends to be that, where there are faults, there are changes in the crust that can cause regions to be more fertile in some cases," Bellini said.

"People are drawn to places where they have water, minerals, and good land. For instance, other than Rio de Janeiro [Brazil] and Buenos Aires [Argentina], most of South America's population lives along the west coast in a subduction zone that's responsible for the largest quake ever recorded [a magnitude 9.5 earthquake in Chile on May 22, 1960]."

Other heavily populated hot spots include the western Pacific from Japan south to the Philippines, Mediterranean locales like Italy and Turkey, Iran, and the communities along California's San Andreas Fault.

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