Earthquakes Ussr

The two teen-agers spend their days glued to a video game screen in their room at Centinela Hospital Medical Center. Having arrived in the United States for medical treatment only last week from Soviet Armenia, they have just become acquainted with the game. And like teen-agers everywhere, they find it irresistible.

Volcanoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters struck at week's end in Asia, South America, the Soviet Union and an island chain in the South Atlantic. Here is a rundown on the burst of activity: PHILIPPINES--A huge fissure cracked Mt. Pinatubo and scientists said the erupting volcano may be building up to a catastrophic blast. The region was also hit by winds and rains generated by a typhoon, and earthquakes triggered by the volcanic eruptions shook parts of Luzon Island.

A massive earthquake struck the Soviet Union's southern republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia on Wednesday, prompting President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to cut short his visit to the United States and return home five days early. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze told a news conference that Gorbachev will fly back to Moscow today, canceling the last day of a three-day stay in New York and scheduled visits to Cuba and Britain.

Strong earthquakes were reported in the Soviet Union and Japan, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. A 6.3-magnitude quake shook the Caucasus mountain range in Soviet Georgia, the same area that was devastated by an earthquake in April, and reports said at least one person was killed and 15 hospitalized. In Japan, a 5.2-magnitude quake jolted a rural area more than 200 miles north of Tokyo. No damage was reported. Meanwhile, a magnitude 6.

Campfires fueled by broken furniture and window frames illuminate the grief-stricken, soot-stained faces of Armenians digging through the debris left by the earthquake that reduced this city to a pile of concrete and corpses. The odors of cremated bodies and those decomposing under the debris mingle in the dust-clouded air, an acrid reminder of the disaster estimated to have killed 90% of Spitak's population of 20,000 people.

Southern California's quarter-million Armenians, traumatized by another disaster in the tragedy-prone history of their people, searched desperately Thursday for scraps of information on Armenia's devastating earthquake and tried to marshal help for victims. Reports of tens of thousands of deaths stunned and instantly mobilized dozens of organizations representing the Armenians' diverse elements here and abroad.

Holy Martyrs Armenian School, bursting at the seams in its Encino campus, had just closed escrow on a $2-million school facility nearby when the Armenian earthquake hit last month. Now faced with monthly mortgage interest payments of $18,000, school officials are concerned about how they're going to come up with the money.

Two aftershocks from a severe earthquake set off landslides Friday that killed at least three people in the mountains of Soviet Georgia. At least 114 people died in Monday's quake and its aftermath, the official Tass news agency reported. The temblor also injured 300, left 70 missing and 67,000 homeless in the southern republic, it said. An unconfirmed report by Soviet television news said the final toll may reach 300 dead and 1,000 injured.

A moderately strong earthquake on Saturday shook the mountains of the Soviet Central Asian republic of Tadzhikistan.

American industrialist Armand Hammer, who brought a planeload of urgently needed medicines and equipment to Soviet Armenia, on Monday described the devastation as the worst disaster he had ever seen and probably the worst in the country's history. "The death and the destruction are horrifying," Hammer said on his return to Moscow from Yerevan, Armenia's capital. "I thought the Mexican earthquake was bad, but this is much, much worse. . . .

Two aftershocks from a severe earthquake set off landslides Friday that killed at least three people in the mountains of Soviet Georgia. At least 114 people died in Monday's quake and its aftermath, the official Tass news agency reported. The temblor also injured 300, left 70 missing and 67,000 homeless in the southern republic, it said. An unconfirmed report by Soviet television news said the final toll may reach 300 dead and 1,000 injured.

An earthquake shook the Soviet Central Asian republic of Tadzhikistan on Thursday, causing some fatalities, the official Tass news agency said. It said the quake, registering between 6 and 7 on the 12-point Soviet scale at its epicenter, 80 miles from the capital of Dushanbe, also damaged or destroyed 100 buildings. The agency gave no figure for the number of people killed.

An avalanche, apparently triggered by a mild earthquake, swept 40 climbers from five nations to their deaths in Soviet Central Asia in one of the world's worst mountaineering disasters, a Soviet official said. The 27 Soviets, six Czechoslovaks, four Israelis, two Swiss and one Spaniard were camped on a ledge known as the "frying pan" about 19,500 feet up in the Pamir Mountains. Friday's avalanche struck on the slopes of 23,456-foot Lenin Peak.

An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.1 shook metropolitan Mexico City early Thursday, sending frightened residents into the streets but causing no reported serious injuries or major damage. At the same time, dozens of strong aftershocks rocked jungle villages in northern Peru, where civil defense officials announced that the death toll had risen to 135 in a 6.3 magnitude quake that struck the area late Tuesday.

A moderate earthquake was recorded in the Kirghizia republic near the town of Osh, 1,600 miles southeast of Moscow, the Tass news agency said Monday. There were no reports of injuries or damage.

American rescue teams that flew to Soviet Armenia in the aftermath of December's devastating earthquake were honored in Los Angeles on Saturday at a luncheon sponsored by a Glendale-based Armenian earthquake relief organization. More than 200 people attended the event at the Century Plaza Hotel, organized by the Earthquake Relief Fund for Armenia, which has raised more than $3 million for earthquake relief efforts. Among those honored at the luncheon were U.S. Air Force Capt.

Students and staff at Los Angeles city schools who have raised several hundred thousand dollars in recent years for disaster victims in Mexico City and Ethiopia will be doing the same for victims of last week's earthquake in Soviet Armenia. School board members indicated their support Monday for a districtwide relief effort, which will be presented for formal approval next week.

The first Armenian earthquake victim flown to the West, a 12-year-old boy, arrived Sunday in West Germany for treatment. Tigran Petrosian, who lost most of a leg when his home collapsed on him, was accompanied by his father, West German doctors and officials aboard an air force jet from Yerevan, the Armenian capital. He was taken to a clinic in Tuebingen, near Stuttgart.

An earthquake hit rural districts of Soviet Armenia near Yerevan, the capital, on Wednesday but caused no damage or casualties, the official news agency Tass reported. An earthquake last December destroyed several towns and cities in the northwest of the republic, killing at least 25,000 people.

More than seven months after Los Angeles-area Armenians mobilized to help their earthquake-ravaged homeland, the bulk of the more than $6 million in relief money raised has yet to be spent, and Armenian organizations are only now making concrete plans about what to do with it. Last week, the largest single coalition of Southern California Armenian groups formed to coordinate disaster relief--the Glendale-based Earthquake Relief Fund for Armenia--announced that it is allocating $1.