Recalling a shaking experience

With the 20th anniversary of Armenia’s devastating earthquake approaching, Glendale resident Vehanush Chilgevorkyan turned to the Internet for answers about what happened to her homeland. What she found was beyond her imagination: a photo of her father, Arsen Chilgevorkyan, helping with the relief effort.

Vehanush Chilgevorkyan has no recollection of living through the magnitude 6.9 earthquake that struck at 11:41 a.m. Dec. 7, 1988, in the Lori region of Soviet Armenia, destroying the city of Spitak and severely damaging the city of Gyumri, where she lived with her family.

The United States Geological Survey record indicates that at least 25,000 people were killed, 19,000 were injured, and 500,000 were left homeless. Despite Lori’s being a seismic region, the $16.2 billion in damage was mainly attributed to poor building construction, timing and freezing winter temperatures.

Vehanush was 4 at the time, and living in Gyumri with her parents and 2-month-old brother Vahe. The family moved to the U.S. in 1993, and the siblings grew up hearing bits and pieces about the earthquake from their mother and grandmother. They knew their father had been a part of the rescue effort, but he rarely spoke of it. So the image Vehanush Chilgevorkyan, now 23, found on photo-sharing website flickr.com was a gold mine of information.

In the black-and-white photo, a warmly dressed Arsen carries one side of a stretcher over jagged hunks of concrete, steel and snow. A hill of rubble forms a backdrop along with several other men sifting through the remains of what was once a building.

Vehanush and Vahe Chilgevorkyan said they always knew their father as a short-tempered and almost unreasonably overprotective parent. And seeing him at a moment when death and destruction were his only companions explained a lot.

“You can never grasp the magnitude of such a thing until you see it,” said Vahe Chilgevorkyan, 20.

The photo prompted Arsen Chilgevorkyan, now in his late 40s, to finally open up about what he had experienced. As one of the few people in Gyumri with a car, he said he drove his family away from the devastation to the capital, Yerevan, then returned to help work through the destruction, using his car as an impromptu hearse for bodies in need of proper burial.

The stress of the two months he spent shuffling back and forth between Gyumri and Yerevan left him with permanently high blood pressure, he said.