Hundreds of people remained without shelter on Tuesday amid temperatures far below freezing in northeast Russia after a series of violent earthquakes, local officials said.
Rescuers decided to evacuate more people on top of the 860 already flown out of the quake zone, said Zhanna Saksina, deputy governor of the Koryaksky region in the remote Kamchatka peninsula.
“We’ll build a makeshift camp for those who are staying,” Saksina said.
Several villages in the quake zone, where temperatures dropped overnight to lower than minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus four degrees Fahrenheit), were still without power and heating, which can only be restored once aftershocks have completely ceased, Viktor Bondarev, a local official, told AFP.
A series of earthquakes measuring up to 7.9 on the Richter scale shook the remote region on Friday, affecting 12 villages with a total population of 12,000 people.
Dozens of people received mild injuries from the tremors.
There have been more than 100 aftershocks since Friday, some felt as far as the village of Palana, 300 kilometres (186 miles) from the epicentre.
Aftershocks were still being felt Tuesday, but were growing weaker and less frequent, Bondarev said.
“While on Sunday aftershocks measured up to 7.5, yesterday they measured around 2 or 3, and they did not occur every half hour any more, but every two to four hours,” he said.
The RIA-Novosti news agency reported Monday that around 10 tons of blankets, camping stoves, bottled water, gas cylinders and building materials were being sent to the region.
The Kamchatka peninsula, which is about the size of Japan, has a population density of less than one person per square kilometres (0.4 square miles).
In 1952, the region was rocked by an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale, the fourth-biggest since 1900, according to data from the US Geological Survey.
