Bucharest D21 Cohort
project findings
Bucharest has not done enough analysis of the city’s building stock to understand how vulnerable the city really is.
Another factor contributing to the vulnerability of buildings is the lack of seismic risk classification for buildings. Due to a combination of underfunding and a lack of interest, the government has not classified thousands of buildings in the city for seismic risk (G. Ilie, personal communication, April 28, 2021). As a result, the true scale of building vulnerability in Bucharest is unknown, leaving the residents of Bucharest unaware and the government ignorant of this vulnerability. Additionally, the communist regime made cosmetic repairs to buildings damaged in the 1977 earthquake without actually addressing the structural damages. While these alterations feigned safety, this practice has exacerbated the issue with Bucharest’s building stock vulnerability by making it more difficult to assess buildings. Unfortunately, many of these buildings are still in disrepair with no current mechanism to identify the true damage hidden by the insufficient repairs (A. Kasprovschi, personal communication, April 23, 2021). Progress on repairing these buildings cannot occur until the government completes an assessment of their vulnerability.
Red dot building in Bucharest, from https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2012/12/08/bucharest_marks_buildings_likely_to_collapse_in_earthquake.html
The team utilized census data to estimate the scale of this problem. This census data showed that 55% of residents in Bucharest live in buildings that survived the 1977 earthquake. These buildings are at an especially high risk because of damage caused during the 1977 earthquake (M. Sumbasacu, personal communication, April 22, 2021). These findings highlight the need for more thorough building assessments in Bucharest since it is not feasible to repair every building in the city. Instead, the city must complete assessments to find which buildings are most vulnerable and proceed with repairing or retrofitting buildings based on this assessment.
Romania’s communist past and culture of avoiding conversation about earthquakes have resulted in a lack of trust in government practices and a lack of clarity as to where responsibility for preparedness lies.
Although 30 years have passed since the fall of the communist regime, its effects still loom large on Romanian society. In all four interviews with Romanian experts, the interviewee brought up communism, revealing that this part of the country’s history still influences aspects of modern-day Romania.
Under CeauÈ™escu’s regime, citizens lived in constant fear of their neighbors turning them in for breaking autocratic communist rules. Since disagreeing with the communist regime was punishable with jail time, citizens rarely dissented. The communist government attempted to “positively influence” anyone who acted against the regime. First, dissidents were subtly threatened by members of the government in an attempt to make them conform. If they continued to raise issues, the government exiled, imprisoned, or even executed them. Furthermore, the communist government organized a series of disinformation campaigns to erase any sense of panic in its citizens (M. Sumbasacu, personal communication, April 22, 2021).
Nicolae Ceaușescu visiting destroyed buildings after the 1977 earthquake, from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world-this-week-history-cuba-civil-rights-martin-luther-king-a8791841.html
Through secret police, “positive influence,” and disinformation campaigns, the communist regime created a climate of distrust and misinformation. This history of distrust has left citizens of Bucharest feeling entirely disconnected from one another. As Georgiana Ilie, a senior editor at the Romanian magazine Decât o Revistă (DoR), put it, “there's no way out of this...other than together. The more...energy you spend defending yourself from others, the more you will not be okay because then instead of growing, all you'll do is just protect yourself and stay away from other people and that's, that's something that I think really affects our ability to be prepared for [an earthquake]” (G. Ilie, personal communication, April 28, 2021). This feeling of disconnect stands in the way of true progress to improving Romanian earthquake preparedness.
“There's no way out of this...other than together. The more...energy you spend defending yourself from others, the more you will not be okay because then instead of growing, all you'll do is just protect yourself and stay away from other people and that's, that's something that I think really affects our ability to be prepared for [an earthquake]” - Georgiana Ilie
NGOs have taken action to counteract this, adopting initiatives to raise public awareness, educate citizens and responders, and reduce earthquake risk.
The level of vulnerability and insufficient preparedness in the past has resulted in NGOs becoming involved with earthquake preparedness in Bucharest. NGOs’ involvement in earthquake preparedness gained momentum in 2017 when the Romanian magazine Decât o Revistă (DoR) published an article by Georgiana Ilie, a senior editor at DoR, titled “Earthquake in the vulnerable city”. This article was a wakeup call for many organizations in Bucharest. Kasprovschi described it as, “a moment in which everybody, at least everybody in our team [Bucharest Community Foundation], definitely not everybody in our community [Bucharest], realized that we haven't discussed much about the earthquake.” Since 2017, NGOs have met every 2-3 months to coordinate resources, and have established a connection with the Romanian Department of Emergency Situations (M. Sumbasacu, personal communication, April 22, 2021; G. Ilie, personal communication, April 28, 2021; A. Kasprovschi, personal communication, April 23, 2021). The Bucharest Community Foundation raises funds and gives grants to “grassroots'' NGOs in Bucharest such as Re:Rise and the Clubul Câinilor Utilitari which are working on projects such as training rescue dogs (see Figure E.3), educating citizens and first responders, implementing checklists and alert systems, and running awareness campaigns (M. Sumbasacu, personal communication, April 22, 2021; G. Ilie, personal communication, April 28, 2021; A. Kasprovschi, personal communication, April 23, 2021).
Matei Sumbasacu, the co-founder of Re:Rise, describes the organization as “one of the NGOs with the broadest and narrowest scope, because we... only work for seismic risk reduction and nothing else, it's the broadest because we do anything to reduce seismic risk”. Re:Rise is currently working with institutions and authorities in Romania to inspire legal, procedural, and systematic changes (M. Sumbasacu, personal communication, April 22, 2021).
Through interviews with experts, the team was able to identify buildings as the type of infrastructure most at risk in the event of an earthquake. One major contributor to this risk is the building codes that the communist regime implemented that the communist regime implemented. Romania’s earthquakes happen deep under the earth’s surface, but the building codes the government developed under communist rule were based on data collected from regions that experience surface earthquakes, instead of deep earthquakes. This data led the government to construct taller buildings under the impression that they were more resilient to earthquakes, when in reality shorter buildings are more suited to withstand the type of earthquake Romania is likely to experience (M. Sumbasacu, personal communication, April 22, 2021).