Chechnya earthquake update

15 October 2008

In the afternoon of October 11, 2008, the North Caucasus was hit by an earthquake. According to local authorities it was the most destructive in the last 30 years in the region. The epicentre of the earthquake, and most destruction and victims, were all in Chechnya. Walls and roofs of houses collapsed in several settlements around the epicentre, killing 13 people. This occurred 40 kilometres east of the capital Grozny and 15 kilometres from the town of Gudermes. Over 100 people have been wounded and dozens were hospitalised to the nearby Gudermes hospital.

Emergency medical aid to the wounded was provided by the state health care agencies. MSF also dispatched on 11 October two mental health counsellors, who are an integral part of MSF’s regular programmes in the region, to the Gudermes hospital in order to help the victims and relatives cope with emotional shock.

Aftershocks could still be felt three days after the earthquake, and most people in the worst affected villages of Gudermes and Kurchaloy districts are afraid to enter their houses and prefer to spend their nights outdoors. Many houses that are still standing after the earthquake, are seriously damaged, with cracks in their walls or their roofs. The hospital in the town of Kurchaloy, the main referral hospital for the population of the district was destroyed. The most affected is Mayrtup village, which is home to at least 11,000 people. Forecasts are predicting that seismic activity will continue in the North Caucasus region in the near future.

“There is a feeling of disaster. People don’t remember anything like this in decades and they are scared,” says Mairbek Abdullayev, a Chechen doctor and the MSF mobile clinics manager. “There are still a lot of aftershocks. When we were doing an assessment, we could still feel the land shaking. No one is entering their house. People have set up tents and their beds outside, and build fires to keep them going all night long.”

In many locations, MSF was the first agency to arrive and assess people’s needs. Five mobile medical teams have intervened in the five worst hit locations – Mayrtup, Bashi-Yurt, Lower and Upper Noybera and Oyskhara. In each location, medical tents were pitched and a team consisting of a therapist, paediatrician and a nurse in one tent, and a mental health counsellor in another tent, are providing consultations to respond to their health needs.

After the first two days of work, 562 medical consultations were done and 398 people received psychological counselling (group and individual consultations). Most patients came with stress-related conditions, such as hypertension, cardio-vascular problems and different psycho-somatic disorders.

“On the first day, our mobile team conducted 130 consultations in Lower Noybera alone, a village with a population of 3,000 people’, says Mairbek. ‘Our doctors saw at least 65 children with colds who were brought for a medical check-up because they had spent a few nights in the street”.

MSF will also conduct an assessment to determine the need for non-food items, such as blankets and stoves. The teams will do a thorough evaluation of water supplies and taps in the region, since the initial assessment showed insufficient availability of potable water.

Although the earthquake was felt to a lesser degree in the neighbouring republics of Ingushetia, Dagestan, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Ossetia, they had not sustained any damage.

MSF has been working in Russia since the beginning of the 1990s. MSF started providing medical and humanitarian aid to the population of Chechnya since the separatist war of 1994. In post-war Chechnya, MSF runs mobile clinics for internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in and around the capital Grozny and in neighbouring Ingushetia. MSF also rehabilitated the buildings of the local polyclinic in Grozny and set up a free pharmacy. MSF runs mother-and-child and women’s health programmes and supports a local maternity house. A mental health component is included in most programmes. MSF provides tuberculosis treatment to the entire population of Chechnya. In hospital #9 in Grozny, MSF supports neurosurgery, trauma and intensive care wards and runs a reconstructive surgery programme, to help treat old violence-related wounds.