52°59′48″N 142°56′47″E / 52.99667°N 142.94639°E / 52.99667; 142.94639

Neftegorsk (Russian: Нефтего́рск), formerly Vostok (Восто́к, lit. east) before 1970, is a ghost town in Sakhalin Oblast, Russia.^[1]

Building

The city was built in 1963. It was an urban-type oil-mining settlement, with its name meaning "Oil Town".^[1] Construction Minister Yefim Basin decided not to rebuild it after its destruction.^[1]

Destruction

It was devastated on May 28, 1995, by an earthquake, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, killing 2,040 people out of a total population of 3,197.^[2] An oil-producing town in northern Sakhalin, many buildings in Neftegorsk had been built with low quality concrete and were not designed to withstand seismic activity.^[2] As is common in remote Russian industrial towns, almost the entire poulation lived in a small number of high density, four-to-five-story apartment buildings. The earthquake destroyed many of these, reducing them to piles of rubble. On multiple streets in the small town, every building collapsed and all residents were killed. Because of the comprehensive nature of the death and destruction in Neftegorsk, it was decided not to be rebuilt, instead a memorial was constructed in the area.^[3] The monument contains aerial pictures of the town both before and immediately after its destruction, allowing visitors a sense of scale of the disaster. Many survivors were relocated to other towns in Sakhalin such as Okha, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, and Nogliki, while others left Sakhalin for the mainland.^[2]

Population