Top Azeri official labels homeland a “powder-keg” for disasters

Agence France Presse — English
March 7, 2005 Monday 1:33 PM GMT

BAKU, March 7 2005 — Azerbaijan’s deputy prime minister called
the former Soviet republic a “powder-keg” for natural and man-made
disasters at a seminar devoted to emergency issues on Monday.

“Everyone knows Azerbaijan is sitting on a powder-keg,” Deputy Prime
Minister Abid Sharifov told a seminar hosted by the French embassy in
Baku before listing a number of high risk areas in the oil-rich region.

“All parts of Azerbaijan are considered to be seismically active …
there is a risk of landslides in many zones and any moment can turn
into a tragedy,” Sharifov said adding that 50 percent of the nation’s
territory is at high flood risk.

In the oil boom that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union the
Azeri capital has become home to a multitude of high-rise buildings,
raising concerns that shoddy workmanship and poor land survey could
lead to their collapse in an earthquake or a land slide.

Many of the buildings had not been built when a medium level earthquake
struck the city in 2000, causing the destruction of a number of
older buildings.

Earlier this year a neighborhood on a ridge in Baku had to be evacuated
when large cracks in the asphalt showed that it had begun sliding
down a precipice.

Azerbaijan is also in danger of terrorist attacks at the hands of its
neighbor Armenia – with which it is still technically at war over the
Nagorno-Karabakh enclave – targeting the US-backed BTC oil pipeline
scheduled to go online later this year, Sharifov said.

“With such a neighbor we are constantly under threat of terrorist
attack,” Sharifov said.

The Caspian nation is unprepared for a chemical disaster too, in case
of an accident or an attack “all we have are gas masks,” Sharifov said.

No single body coordinates disaster emergency efforts in Azerbaijan,
prompting Sharifov to call for the creation of an emergency situations
ministry or agency.