The night Bucharest fell down

In the Mica-Nestor building on Calea Victoriei, the painter Nicolae Stanciu ran for the stairs with his neighbours. “And I felt them sink away with us. When we came to, we were in darkness, in a narrow space that only let us crouch.”

The earthquake lasted 55–56 seconds and measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. The epicentre was in Vrancea. The wave reached Bucharest and shook the city horizontally and vertically, travelling from north-east to south-west.

On a city rooftop, the sentry Mircea Nemigean watched the blocks sway “like a forest driven by the most terrible storm”. A strong wind came, then a heavy smell of burning. The lights went out. “That's it, I think the city is done for,” he said to himself.

How strong was it, exactly?

• 7.2Richter degrees — the number spoken at the time, still used in Romania
• 7.4 Mwseismic moment from INCDFP
• 7.5 Mwseismic moment from the ISC/USGS catalogue

Inside, people heard the roar of the earth and the howl of collapses: “a muffled sound, a dry sound, coming from everywhere at once”. Fires broke out, windows shattered, branches snapped in calm air, bells rang. Some stayed paralysed in their homes. Others rushed down the stairs in pyjamas and gowns, bleeding from shards of glass.

The 7.2 is the local magnitude, the one read on the radio at the time. Today's seismologists give the seismic moment: 7.4 from the National Institute for Earth Physics, 7.5 from the American catalogue. The modern depth is 94 kilometres; older studies wrote 110.

In Bucharest, a Japanese SMAC-B instrument recorded the earthquake from start to finish. Its paper, digitised and processed in Japan into a 254-page report, remains the truest witness of the minute: the wave had come from under Vrancea, from tens of kilometres down.

Vrancea quakes are born 60–200 kilometres deep, in a tight nest 40 by 90 kilometres across, under the south-eastern corner of the Carpathian arc. There is no plate boundary there today; seismologists speak of an ancient subduction zone. The hypocentres line up on a near-vertical plane striking north-east to south-west.

In 1977 the rupture started 125 kilometres down and climbed through the seismic plane. The largest aftershock, at 4.7, came from 48 kilometres. The epicentre stood about 100 kilometres from Bucharest.

How far it was felt

• 1.3 million km²the area over which the quake was felt
• 80,000 km²the area with damage
• 23 of 40counties strongly affected, Bucharest first

Vrancea had struck before. On 10 November 1940 a deep quake of about 140 kilometres, felt across 2 million square kilometres, brought down the Carlton block in Bucharest and badly damaged other tall blocks: Belvedere, Wilson, Lengyel, Pherekyde, Broșteni, Gălășescu. In 1838 the capital's police counted 8 dead, 14 injured and 36 collapsed buildings. In 1829 the magnitude had reached 7.3.

At the Scala confectionery, Florica Iordache was washing the customers' plates when the wave struck. The block above — Nicolae Bălcescu Boulevard, corner of C. A. Rosetti — turned into a heap of rubble. By Sunday night 108 dead and 6 living had been pulled from under it. She was found on Monday at dawn, wedged between fallen slabs.

Off the map: the OD16 block in Militari, total collapse (detail from a secondary source).

Most fallen blocks were interwar, raised with no seismic rules. The 1935 city plan had pushed the tallest buildings into the very centre: 6–7 full storeys plus 2–3 set back. That is why 29 of the 32 collapsed tall buildings stood in the city centre.

The ledger of the streets

The full list of the 32 was never published. The ledger above gathers the blocks the sources name; for the rest, the death count by address stayed undocumented.

Three weaknesses condemned them. The open ground floor, with shops and no walls between columns, left the block soft at its base. The 1940 quake had already cracked their frames. And their concrete measured 100–200 daN/cm², a weak concrete. What fell above all were the old flexible blocks of 6–12 storeys.

The contrast condemns and absolves the builders at once. Rigid large-panel or shear-wall buildings of the same height suffered little damage. So did 1–3-storey masonry houses. The danger lay in the combination of height, age and design without earthquakes.

Over 120 tall pre-war blocks were listed, at the time of the study, in seismic risk class 1: likely collapses at the next large quake.

“A little hand pierces the layer of rubble, and moments later the soldiers lift a small girl into the light. She is crouched, kept in the position in which she had stayed for 62 hours.” Gabriela Doina Corduneanu, a first-grade pupil, found her father again on 7 March at 11:30.

Under the Continental rubble also lay Toma Caragiu, Alexandru Bocăneț, Doina Badea with her family, Anatol E. Baconsky, Mihai Gafița, Veronica Porumbacu and Mihail Petroveanu. From the same heap the writer Romulus Rusan came out alive: the quake had caught him with the telephone in his hand, and the bed had slid with him “like a sledge” down seven floors. A 30-year-old, Bucur Gabriel, saved him at 00:05.

The record went to Sorin Crainic Ivan, 19: pulled out after 251 hours, eleven nights, he answered from under the rubble “I am a man from the evening of the 4th…”. He beat the nine days of Agadir, the longest survival known until then.

On the morning of 5 March the first toll said 508 dead and 2,600 injured (secondary source). Work to bring back water, gas, power and telephones had already begun. Beside soldiers and firefighters, the Buftea stuntmen, doctors and thousands of volunteers went under the rubble.

The Enei church near the University, damaged, never got its consolidation: it was demolished, with the neo-Gothic house of the architect Cerchez and the merchant houses on I. C. Brătianu. Under the pretext of the quake's aftermath, the abusive demolitions began.

On the empty sites new buildings grew: nine storeys on the Scala site, a plain building on the Casata site, three blocks on the Dunărea site, the București hotel complex on the Nestor site, a sober edifice on the Continental site.

On 30 March 1977 the state set the consolidation strategy: old buildings had to be brought back to their pre-1940 strength. After the quake came the order for the capital's new political-administrative centre: for the People's House, the Brâncovenesc hospital and the State Archives in the Mihai Vodă precinct disappeared.

The lessons stayed on paper longer than in the walls. Specialists had asked since 1977 for every building raised without seismic rules to be assessed, with a risk-reduction plan. Over 120 pre-war blocks in the centre sit in risk class 1 to this day.

You are the engineer called in 1977 to say which blocks may still stand. Eight boards, eight verdicts. Every answer comes with its proof from the studies.