September 22, 2002	Sunday	Rajab 14, 1423

VLADIKAVKAZ, (Russia) Sept 21: A huge glacier slid down a mountain side in southern Russia, tearing 20 km (12 miles) through rural communities and leaving possibly as many as 100 people dead, emergency officials said on Saturday.

An Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman said a massive chunk of ice broke away from the Maili glacier in the Caucasus mountain range on Friday night, sending a towering wall of ice, mud and rocks thundering into the region of North Ossetia.

In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin said the piece of rogue ice which had ripped through an area around the village of Karmadon had been between 70 and 100 metres thick.

“It is a huge catastrophe. I can not remember anything like it,” he said in televised comments, adding that the main priority now was to rescue survivors.

Rescue officials stressed that with communications devastated in the rural region it was difficult to give anything more than an approximate number of those who could have died.

But Mikhail Shatalov, head of the North Ossetia regional government, told Itar-Tass news agency that as many as 100 people might have lost their lives.

Regional officials said Karmadon, the main village in the area where about 30 people lived, had been virtually entombed in ice and the area around it devastated.

Among those missing were members of a 27-person television film crew from Moscow, as well as villagers, shepherds and fell walkers.

Emergencies Ministry spokeswoman Marina Ryklina said it was difficult to pin down firm casualty figures “because there are many tourists and many mountain climbers in that area”.

The huge lump of ice, which Interfax news agency put at two to three million cubic metres in volume, clipped Karmadon as it thundered along its path.

“At first we thought that water was pouring down. When it had all stopped we came out of our houses and saw huge pieces of ice. They were as big as KAMAZ trucks,” said Elbrus Doyev, an inhabitant of the village of Gizel. The KAMAZ is a heavy goods truck commonly used throughout the former Soviet Union.—Reuters