The spring the water came

Night of the break

13/14 May 1970

Water in the lower quarter

2 m

Dead in Satu Mare

52–56, by source

On the evening of 13 May 1970 an old meteorologist, one-legged since the war, warns Satu Mare's flood command: the announced crest may stay below the earth dikes, but the dikes are ancient, crumbling, in places perforated by rats, and any drifting trunk can pierce them. The command threatens him with prison for spreading panic and sends a loudspeaker car through town to say the city is safe.

In the night the dike breaks and the quarter below it floods in moments. The Someș water takes the power plant, the lights go out, and people who can no longer see the water coming cannot save themselves in time. All night the town hears screams and calls for help; soldiers row with boats and lanterns, and some of the living are found up trees.

By morning the lower quarter is a lake. Nicolae Ceaușescu walks it in rubber boots to the county council and berates the officials; the eyewitness Virgil Lazar flies over a churning sea of muddy water carrying animals, trees and the remains of houses and bridges.

The county pays the highest price in the country: almost 40% of its surface under water, over 21,500 houses hit, the two-metre maximum measured in the lower quarter, no house there untouched, 56 dead and over 20,000 animals by one count, 52 dead by another. The population's losses are estimated at 259 million lei.

Eight kilometres east, the village of Odoreu stays a dry island in the ad-hoc sea. A young Hungarian agronomist studies an imperial-era contour map and has plough dikes drawn around the village along the highest contours; a military helicopter drops loaves of bread on a rope to the cut-off inhabitants. In Satu Mare's quarter, renamed 14 Mai, a monument keeps the yearly ceremonies.

Saved by one boat

50

The dam break

14 May, 10:45

Water at Mediaș

3 m

On 13 May the Târnava Mare takes Sighișoara's lower town, the water climbing to the first floor of the central houses. On strada Clujului a man in his thirties, Otto Lurtz, owns a boat and knows the rivers; he rows out among the rooftops and starts picking people from attic openings and roofs.

He ferries them one by one, 50 people saved, and leaves his own father for last. He is too late: the water takes the old man and destroys the house. The national press makes Lurtz a hero, and after the flood his story enters the sixth-grade German textbook.

The covered wooden bridge, the finest in the area, handmade, with gates at both ends, goes with the water. The next morning, 14 May, at around 10:45, the Târnava Mare breaks its dike 4–5 kilometres upstream of Mediaș, near the commune of Brateiu.

The water spills over the fields and is soon in town: about 3 metres deep, up to the rooftops, from Strada Stadionului to Dealul Furcilor, up the hospital slope, around the post office crossroads, through Fabrica 8 Mai, the Automecanica works, the aviation military unit and the textile factory. The bridge to Gura-Câmpului is badly damaged.

Two towns, one river system: the Târnava Mare feeds the Mureș, and the Mureș is already writing its record downstream. Sighișoara will learn this twice, for the second wave of 23–25 May puts its lower streets back under water.

Crest at Cluj

8.82 m

Mureș at Alba Iulia

over 8 m

Rain at Bistrița in 48 h

117 litres

In Cluj the ordeal runs from midnight on 12 May to seven in the evening on 13 May. The water climbs past every mark the city knows, the Făclia newsroom sends its men to the banks, and the morning edition carries a line the hydrologists will quote for decades.

The county reports a maximum of 9 metres and a retreat to the minor bed on 15 May. At Dej 1,572 houses are damaged, 73 destroyed outright, 7 people die and 1,114 families are evacuated; across the county 4,226 houses flood, 813 are destroyed, 2,144 damaged, and 11,105 people are evacuated. Damages: 19 million lei.

At Alba Iulia the Mureș writes its all-time record on 14 and 15 May: locally over 8 metres above normal, two crests, the whole centre under water for days, the lowest streets drowned to the rooftops. Over 10,000 people are left stricken, 180 households destroyed with their buildings, 2,600 hectares flooded. Upstream, at the Țicău narrows, the Someș bursts over the railway embankment and floods everything to the church bell tower.

The sky had been loading this since January: double the usual rain on saturated ground, 93 cm of snow on Vârful Omu on the morning of 11 May, then subtropical air and 30 degrees in the south. In 48 hours, between 12 and 14 May, over 50 litres per square metre fall across Transylvania and Maramureș, over 100 in Mureș, Bistrița-Năsăud and Maramureș: 117 litres at Bistrița, 112 at Vârful Iezerul.

Andrei Doneaud counts 2.5 billion cubic metres of water in one deluge, enough for a tanker train circling the equator more than forty times. Atanase Mustățea spreads the 12–25 May rains evenly and gets a layer of eight centimetres over the whole country, a once-in-200-year event: once in 400 at Beclean, once in 250–300 at Satu Mare.

Soldiers in the water

19,000

Flight hours

429

People pulled out

66,500

On 15 May a helicopter leaves Bucharest for Alba Iulia, where the whole centre has been under water for days. Between 14 and 16 May its crew pulls 103 people from drowning, roof by roof; one of them is lowered on a rope, a private named Nelu Pavel, moving through rain, cold and wind.

The published statistics count 19,000 soldiers between 13 May and 25 June, in 38 counties and 350 localities, with 429 flight hours behind them. Out of the waters they pull 66,500 people, 197,000 animals and 11,000 tonnes of goods; they build or strengthen 500 km of dike and rebuild 26 bridges. On 18 August 1970 five of them are decorated post-mortem.

The sky does not rest. A second wave strikes on 23–25 May, fed by 48 more hours of rain over the upper Târnave, the upper Olt, the Bârlad basin and the Banat rivers. Sighișoara, barely out of the first water, goes under again: the Târnava Mare roller wrecks the textile combine and part of the power plant.

A third wave follows on 11–13 June and drags into early July across Satu Mare, Maramureș, Bihor, Alba, Bistrița-Năsăud, Sălaj, Sibiu, Hunedoara and Gorj. The Danube leaves its bed over Ialomița, Brăila, Galați and Tulcea; downstream, Galați and Brăila know by 3 June that the three-week-old crest will reach them on 11 June.

The American press of the time reports the world sending help: the largest single relief, some $400,000, from China, the first relief plane from Israel, then the United States and the Netherlands, a week passing before the Soviet offer. Over a dozen countries give aid, and Bucharest opens a special fund for the victims.

Death tolls on record

four

Houses destroyed outright

13,070

Damages

10 billion lei

The counting starts while the mud is still wet, and it never settles on one number. The contemporary American appraisal reports 162 dead; the hydrologists Ujvari and Anițan list 166 identified victims and 14 missing; the American press closes at 209 killed; the disaster database EM-DAT records 215 victims for May 1970.

Each number carries its author's method: a wartime-style situation report, a hydrological ledger, a foreign correspondent's final dispatch, a database entry built decades later. They count different scopes in different weeks, so they cannot be averaged and should not be ranked.

The material toll is steadier. Behind the hydrologists' names stand 1,058,376 hectares under water, 85,453 houses hit and 13,070 destroyed outright, 385 enterprises, 934 km of railway, 2,843 km of roads and 3,547 bridges. The communist authorities put the damages at 10 billion lei, when the average wage was 1,289 lei.

The state answers with institutions and concrete. The National Water Council is re-founded with basin directorates, research institutes and dredging companies; dikes go up along the wounded rivers; in 1978 the Stânca-Costești dam starts operating on the Prut to shield its downstream villages.

Memory keeps its own ledger. In Satu Mare's 14 Mai quarter a monument stands where the water stood two metres deep, with ceremonies every year; the IATC students Stere Gulea, Dan Pița and Mircea Veroiu film the drowned country in «Apa ca un bivol negru»; Marin Sorescu raises the flood onto the stage in his 1976 play «Matca».