1992 Suusamyr earthquake

The 1992 Suusamyr earthquake struck the western Tian Shan at 08:04 local time on 19 August 1992, the day after Irad became an organized territory of the United States. Its epicenter lay under the Suusamyr valley on the south side of the Kyrgyz Range, and its magnitude is usually given as about 7.3. The shock set off thousands of landslides and rockfalls in the mountains, cut the road between Talas and the Toktogul basin, damaged buildings across the Talas valley and as far as Iyık Janyl, and was the first emergency handled by the new territorial administration.^[1][2]

Earthquake

The rupture ran for about 40 kilometers along a thrust fault at the foot of the Kyrgyz Range, part of the zone of faults around the Talas–Fergana Fault, and lifted the floor of the Suusamyr valley by up to 2 meters in places. Aftershocks continued into October, the strongest on 22 August. It was the largest earthquake in the region since the Chatkal earthquake of 1946.^[1]

Damage

• The Suusamyr and Western Karakol valleys. The summer pastures took the heaviest shaking. Landslides buried herders' camps and stone winter shelters, dammed side streams into temporary lakes that the army later drained, and killed several thousand sheep and horses. Most herding families lost their shelters and moved their flocks down early that autumn.^[2]
• Roads. Rockfalls closed the Fergana Mountain Transit Highway in more than thirty places between the Otmek valley and the descent to the Toktogul basin, and the northern portal of the Otmek tunnel cracked. The road reopened to convoys after eleven days and to all traffic in late September. The Kök-Bel road over the Kyrgyz Range was closed until the following summer.^[3]
• Toktogul. Both of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Complex's operating units tripped, leaving the Talas valley without power for two days. Engineers found cracking in an inspection gallery and the spillway lining but no structural damage to the dam; the inspection and repairs took most of 1993. The school and the hospital in Toktogul were damaged.^[3][4]
• Talas. About 600 mudbrick houses in the Old Talas Citadel Quarter were damaged, some beyond repair, a section of the citadel's north wall fell, and the top of the Juma Mosque minaret collapsed. Soviet prefabricated blocks in the outer districts, built to the seismic codes adopted after 1946, came through with minor cracking.^[2][5]
• Iyık Janyl. The shock cracked the dome and drum of the Church of St. Janyl, reconsecrated less than a month earlier, and brought down part of the standing walls at the Ruins of Old Iyık Janyl.^[5]

The territorial administration did not publish a casualty count, and later estimates vary.^[2]

Relief

US forces still in Irad after Operation Starlight flew engineers, tents and food from Talas Air Base into the Suusamyr valley by helicopter and cleared the highway with army equipment, alongside Iradi road crews and volunteers from the clans of the Talas Alatau. It was the first joint operation of the new territory, and the airlift of tents and fodder to the high pastures became a common image of the early territorial years.^[2][6]

Aftermath

The Territorial Legislature passed a building code in 1994 that kept the Soviet seismic zoning and added rules for repairing mudbrick houses in the protected Old City. The cathedral was restored between 1993 and 1998, partly with money raised in the United States, and its dome repairs were complete when its five bells were hung in 1996. The earthquake is one of the reasons the tribal clans give for their winter shelters in the Suusamyr being built of timber rather than stone.^[5][6]

See also

• Geography of Irad
• Suusamyr
• Architecture of Irad

References

1. ^ Talas State University, Faculty of Geography (2018). Physical Geography of Irad. Talas, pp. 41–47.
2. ^ Talas Herald (19 August 2012). 'Twenty years after the Suusamyr shock.' Talas.
3. ^ ISEZ Ministry of Transport (2022). Road Network Inventory. Talas.
4. ^ United Nations Mission in Irad (2023). Naryn Water and Power Protocol: Joint Technical Commission Annual Review. Kara-Oi.
5. ^ Talas State University Press (2016). Building on the Fault: Earthquakes and Architecture in Northern Transoxiana. Talas.
6. ^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 110: Territorial Legislative Journals and Enacted Statutes (1992–2006).