The lesson of an Albanian earthquake: The Balkans aren't ready for the big one

Durres, Albania

THE Nov 26 earthquake in Albania killed 51 people, sent hundreds to hospitals and left thousands homeless. As the shock recedes, the tragedy offers a stark warning for a region that has been devastated by much more powerful quakes in the past and that experts warn is ill-prepared for the next big one.

From Bucharest in Romania to Sophia in Bulgaria and across the Balkan nations in south-eastern Europe, successive governments have failed to address the risks posed by ageing buildings.

Or they encouraged building booms in the 1990s, during the transition from communism to capitalism, in which safety standards often took a back seat to a quick buck.

The result is that millions of people live in homes unlikely to survive a major earthquake, experts say.

Driving through the hardest hit areas after the recent earthquake in Albania, the scale of the challenge was evident. The quake had rendered poorly constructed buildings even more vulnerable, exposing tens of thousands to potential future danger.

The country does not have nearly enough engineers and experts to assess all the properties that were damaged, and even when the risk is known, the cost of doing needed repairs is often prohibitive in one of Europe's poorest countries.

In December, Prime Minister Edi Rama said the government was reshaping the budget to help deal with the crisis but that international support was desperately needed.

"Simply, it is humanly impossible to do this alone," he said.

While Albania continues to reel, others in the region are using the moment to sound an alarm.

Walking the streets of the old city in Bucharest, visitors with a keen eye will spot red circles - just above the eye line - on hundreds of buildings.

They were put there by engineers to classify the buildings at greatest risk in the event of seismic activity.

In the Romanian capital alone, 349 structures were deemed at the highest risk and likely to collapse in a major earthquake. Many of them are apartment complexes. Hundreds of other buildings are expected to suffer major structural damage.

And those are just the ones that have been inspected.

"We only speak of about 300 buildings in danger of collapsing in Bucharest," said Matei Sumbasacu, the founder of Re:Rise, Romania's first non-governmental organisation focused on reducing seismic risk.

"This is criminal," he added, "and we are telling this to the people inside the buildings." He is so passionate about the subject that he has tattooed on his right forearm the seismic data of an earthquake that rocked the country in 1977.

Still, the memories of past tragedies have a way of fading.

Romania has experienced two devastating earthquakes in the 20th Century. In 1940, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck at Vrancea, in eastern Romania, and caused widespread destruction.

Then, on March 4, 1977, a 7.2 magnitude quake hit in the same region. The ensuing shock waves destroyed more than 30 high-rise buildings in Bucharest, almost 161 km away. An estimated 1,578 people were killed, and roughly 11,000 were injured.

It was one of the worst natural disasters in modern Romanian history and led to a series of reforms.

Professor Radu Vacareanu, the rector at the Technical University of Civil Engineering of Bucharest, said that no country was truly ready for a large-scale earthquake, except for perhaps Japan.

Since its 1977 quake, Romania has put in place good technical regulations, with fairly rigorous enforcement, he said.

But progress in retrofitting some of the most at-risk private buildings has not been as good as expected, he said, "mainly because of complicated ownership".

"You have buildings with many owners of different apartments, and it is very difficult, almost impossible in some situations, to get a consensus," Professor Vacareanu said.

If a similar earthquake struck today, he said, the losses in terms of affected buildings and people killed would be "at least as high as in 1977".

"We have buildings here in Bucharest that were affected by the 1940 earthquake and then the 1977 earthquake and then the 1986 earthquake," he said. "Damage is accumulating from one to the other." Mr Sumbasacu, of Re:Rise, said that the government was underestimating the risk.

"We had an exercise in simulating an earthquake in 2018, and they said that over 4,000 people died," he said. "If the authorities say that we will have 4,000 victims, and they have the role of calming the population, you can imagine the real extent and magnitude. We may easily pass the 10,000 mark for the death toll."

Driving along the Adriatic coast, from northern Dalmatia in Croatia through Montenegro and south into Albania, the results of shifts in tectonic plates over the ages can be seen in the stunning landscape of mountains that rise sharply high above the Adriatic Sea.

That landscape is still being shaped, rendering a long stretch of the Balkan coast susceptible to tremors.

"The earth is constantly shivering here," said Professor Bozidar S Pavicevic. Visitors to Dubrovnik are quickly educated on how tragedy helped shape the famed city after a 1667 earthquake nearly levelled the magnificent walled city, burying thousands of people and triggering fires that raged for weeks.

Prof Pavicevic, 86, had his "first encounter with destruction" during the Skopje earthquake of 1963, which left more than 1,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.

The tragedy sparked the civil engineer's decades-long study and fierce advocacy of taking seismic activity into account when considering new buildings, infrastructure and urban plans.

The nascent field blossomed after a rash of devastating earthquakes hit the former Yugoslavia - starting with Skopje and ending with a 7.2 magnitude quake centred in Montenegro in 1979, which affected nearly the entire Adriatic coast.

"That was a whole new category," Prof Pavicevic said of the quake, which he experienced near its epicentre outside the Montenegrin capital.

At the time, he was the director of Montenegro's Institute for Urban Planning and Projects, making him a key figure in coordinating the former Yugoslav republic's response, along with help from the US Geological Survey.

"We finally saw the phenomenal impact of an earthquake spread over a wide area," he said, recounting the US$4.5 billion in damage - equal to about four years' worth of the small republic's gross domestic product.

"That is when seismic risk evolved into something included in spatial and urban plans," he said.

Those 20th-Century earthquakes turned the Balkans into a petri dish for studying plate tectonics. Yet Professor Pavicevic worries that the Balkans have ignored their own seismic history and the lessons it teaches.

It is a feeling shared by other experts in the region, including Mr Sumbasacu in Romania.

"We need more courage, we need more political courage, because someone needs to be open about it," he said. "We need to accept our vulnerability." NYTIMES