Twenty years after the Suusamyr shock

SUUSAMYR — At four minutes past eight this morning, twenty years ago, the earthquake that seismologists measure at about 7.3 struck under the Suusamyr valley on the south side of the Kyrgyz Range. It was the day after Irad became an organized territory of the United States, and it was the new administration's first emergency.

The summer pastures took the worst of it. Landslides buried herders' camps and stone winter shelters and dammed side streams into lakes that the army later drained, and several thousand sheep and horses were lost. In Talas about 600 mudbrick houses in the Citadel Quarter were damaged, part of the citadel's north wall fell and the top of the Juma Mosque minaret came down. The territorial administration never published a count of the dead, and estimates still vary.

An old herder who was camped at the head of the valley that morning remembered the sound before the shaking. "It was like a train under the grass," he said. "Then the mountain across the river came down to the water, and the horses ran, and we ran after them." His family wintered in Talas that year, in a tent from the airlift.

That airlift, of tents, food and fodder flown up from Talas Air Base by helicopter alongside Iradi road crews and volunteers from the Talas Alatau clans, became one of the defining images of the early territorial years. Twenty years on the shelters in the valley have been rebuilt, the road is open, and on the pastures the old men still say "before the shaking" and "after".