From the plateau we drive down to along the Pambak River to Spitak.
The Spitak Earthquake is named after this town. The Earthquake had a magnitude of 6.9 and took place on December 7, 1988. The earthquake killed at least 25,000 people. Geologists and earthquake engineering experts laid the blame on the poorly built support structures of apartments and other buildings built during the "stagnation" era of Leonid Brezhnev. Local housing infrastructure (particularly schools and hospitals) performed poorly in the earthquake.
The entire city of Spitak was destroyed, and there was partial damage to the nearby cities of Gyumri and Vanadzor. The tremor also caused damage to many surrounding villages.
Since most of the hospitals in the area were destroyed, and because of extremely low winter temperatures, officials at all levels were not ready for a disaster of this scale and the relief effort was therefore not launched properly. The Armenian government let in foreign aid workers to help with the recovery in the earthquake's aftermath, and this was one of the first cases when rescue and relief workers from other countries were allowed to take part in relief works in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev, on a visit to the United States, cut his trip short and went directly to Armenia to visit the quake-affected areas.
The railway between Yerevan and runs along the Pambak and Debed River (Debed River starts when Pambak River joins Dzoraget River) and the whole gorge was in the soviet times heavily industrialized. On the way through the gorge you pass the ruins of one big industrial complex after the other, all seems to be poorly build and in different stages of crumpling.
Under the old Soviet central planning system, Armenia had developed a modern industrial sector, of which big part was in the Debed canyon, supplying machine tools, chemicals, electronic products, machinery, processed food, synthetic rubber and textiles and other manufactured goods to sister republics in exchange for raw materials and energy. Since the implosion of the USSR in December 1991, Armenia has switched to small-scale agriculture and small enterprises and the unemployment rate is very high.
On the plateau lives the Yazidis Kurds - the largest ethnic and religious minority in Armenia. Relations between the Yazidis and the ethnic Armenian majority have varied (from cooperation to persecution by the latter). Currently, Yazidis have freedom of religion and non-interference in their cultural traditions.
View over the Debed Gorge, with river, road and railway. its is a small river and in soviet times it must have been very heavily polluted with industrial wastewater from all the big industrial complexes along the river - without any sewage treatment.
The only big industry from soviet times that is still working is the Alaverdi copper smelter. It is probably a good example of the total lack off environmental concern that characterized the soviet industries.
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