The town was devastated by
an earthquake on May 28, 1995, which measured 7.1 on the
moment magnitude scale, killing 1,989 out of a total population of 3,977. 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.Matthew Brezezinski gives an account in his book
Casino Moscow:"This was Neftegorsk, literally Oiltown, a Soviet-era housing project for roughnecks and their families. Although it was built alongside a tectonic fault line, central planners had not bothered to pour the flexible, reinforced foundations required by building codes in earthquake zones throughout the world. Instead, they just slapped up the usual shoddy precast concrete structures. In May 1995, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale had erupted just a dance was getting underway at the Neftegorsk cultural centre. When the dust settled three minutes later, two thousand people were dead, and the whole place had been leveled." As is common in remote Russian industrial towns, almost the entire population 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, and a memorial was instead constructed in the area. 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. ==Population==