The Earth's Madness

Disaster announced its presence in Bucharest one evening last week with a long, moaning roar. The earth began to heave, and older buildings in the pleasant, tree-shaded Rumanian capital (pop. 1.7 million) shuddered and started to collapse. A major earthquake--registering 7.2 on the Richter scale--had struck. For six terrifying minutes, the calamitous shaking continued.

It was the worst quake to hit Europe in decades.* In Bucharest, at least 500 died and 2,600 were injured, and there were fears that the death toll in all of Rumania might reach into the thousands. The oil-producing center of Ploesti, 35 miles north of Bucharest, also suffered damage, and the seismic spasm affected Rumania's neighbors. In Bulgaria, 20 people were reported killed, and more than 100 were injured in Yugoslavian border towns. Chandeliers swayed as far away as Rome and Naples; in Moscow, buildings trembled and pictures shook off walls.

Air Raid. In Bucharest, thousands were homeless. Many of the terrified survivors streamed into suburban parks and the surrounding countryside in fear of further tremors. An employee at the Austrian embassy in Bucharest reported that there were "rifts and holes more than a meter wide in other houses. Heaps of rubbish lay in the streets. It was sheer madness."

The tragedy could have been much worse. Although one Western diplomat in Bucharest said that "the center of the town looked as though an air raid had hit it," TIME's Richard Gross cabled that relatively few buildings were actually flattened. "Most of those that were damaged had their roofs or top floors shaken loose. The rubble bombarded residents, who fled to the streets in panic. Motorists, not knowing where to flee, drove around in circles for hours in panic, creating horrendous traffic jams in a city where most people are too poor to afford cars. Yet U.S. embassy officials expressed surprise that the damage had been so light, considering the intensity of the quake."

The epicenter of the quake was roughly 100 miles north of Bucharest, in the Vrancea mountain range of the breathtakingly beautiful Transylvanian Alps. One town near the center: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, home of Olympic Gymnast Nadia Comaneci. (Comaneci's whereabouts after the quake were unknown, but she was presumed safe.) The area is well known to seismologists as an active earthquake zone; as many as 200 minor tremors may be recorded annually. Rumania's worst previous earthquake, in fact, centered on the same spot in 1940, damaging the same major centers and leaving about 400 dead.

Within 20 minutes of the quake, rescue crews were on the streets of Bucharest. President Nicolae Ceausescu cut short a five-nation tour of Africa and hastily summoned a meeting of Rumania's Political Executive Committee. The group decreed a state of emergency, requisitioned food stocks, shut off all gas mains in the capital, and closed the university, presumably to create temporary shelter for the homeless and wounded. Troops cordoned off major portions of the downtown area to protect people from falling masonry, and possibly to prevent looting. Sports stadiums in the city were converted into makeshift hospitals, and more than 50 American medical students in the country were among those pressed into relief service.

Offers of aid came from the U.S., Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Luxembourg. The Swiss offered to send specially trained dog teams to help sniff out any remaining bodies. But while digging out from the disaster, President Ceausescu still had time to order an investigation into shoddy construction practices revealed by the earthquake on the outskirts of Bucharest, where new and ostensibly sturdy buildings developed glaring cracks in their walls.

* Last year, serious earthquakes struck Guatemala, killing 22,000; the area surrounding Tientsin in China, with a toll of perhaps 665,000; Mindanao, 8,000; Turkey. 5,000: and northern Italy. 1,000.

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