It needn’t have been. Shoddy Soviet engineering and recent budget cuts compounded the tragedy in the western Pacific. Neftegorsk, about 4,000 miles and eight time zones from Moscow, grew up almost overnight during the oil-boom years of the 1960s, a town of huge and miserably constructed apartment units butt on sandy soft and never shored up or properly maintained since. Recent cost-cutting forced the closing of five of the island’s six seismic stations, which could have given residents some warning–and probably saved lives. “We live from earthquake to earthquake,” says Aleksei Nikolayev, director of the Center for Seismology and Engineering in Moscow. “Until something happens, no one does anything about it. It’s like the Russian saying ‘A man doesn’t cross himself until the first burst of thunder’.”
Can do: Boris Yeltsin waited three days before making a televised response, “Tragedies like these bring people closer together, make them feel like a single family,” he said. That feeling, apparently, didn’t extend to Japan, which offered to help the rescuers. “We can do it ourselves,” Yeltsin replied, adding that Tokyo was probably hoping to grab back the disputed Kuril Islands in return for humanitarian aid–an outburst for which he later apologized. The survivors of Neftegorsk were less forgiving, angrily rejecting Yeltsin’s promise of up to $10,000 per family to resettle; officials were advising them to head for Okha, 55 miles north. “Give us money!” a small crowd yelled. “We’ll decide where we want to live.” That might well be farther inland: in Okha, the earthquake also cracked Soviet-era buildings constructed in the same slipshod way.
