Housing is one of our priorities. In Bucharest and in the southeast of the country housing issues are compounded by seismic vulnerability.

The high-intensity earthquakes in Turkey in 2023 showed the devastating effects they can have on local communities: loss of lives, massive damage, and families left with nothing overnight.

Over the years, we have undertaken several targeted actions to raise awareness about the challenges of seismically vulnerable housing. We began these actions after the Colectiv fire, an event that profoundly marked us and highlighted our city’s vulnerability to disasters. We geo-referenced buildings that had been assessed and classified into emergency categories and mapped them on a user-friendly platform, seismic-alert.ro (now defunct). We developed a survey to assess the status of red-tagged buildings in Bucharest, which we conducted in the field with the help of students from the Faculty of Geography in Bucharest, coordinated by our colleague Bogdan Suditu. We wanted to determine how many people live in these red-tagged buildings. We counted over 12,000 individuals without even managing to cover all the red-tagged buildings—a chilling figure! We encountered people living daily in fear that today could be the day of the big earthquake, as well as others completely unaware of the risk they are in.

We launched a brochure to explain to homeowners’ associations the support mechanisms they can access for building consolidation. Later, we produced an album titled “Bucharest, the Vulnerable City,” created with the help of photographer Cătălin Alexa (www.imagist.ro) and edited by Gruia Bădescu and Raluca Munteanu. The album presents a comprehensive gallery of red-tagged buildings in Bucharest and includes comments and examples from other countries about the challenges of seismic vulnerability in the built environment and best practices for risk communication and awareness.

In 2019, members of our core team (Marina, Bogdan, Mihai, and Ana) were brought on as independent experts in the larger team working on the analysis and strategic directions proposal for the National Strategy for Reducing Seismic Risk. This project was implemented by the World Bank in support of the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration. It was an enormous, multidisciplinary effort that made us more aware of the scale of the risk we face as a country, the urgency, and the complexity of the necessary measures (the resulting documentation is available online on the MDLPA website here).

In 2022, the National Strategy for Reducing Seismic Risk was finally approved by the Government, marking a significant step in outlining work plans and mobilizing political will and investment resources towards greater seismic resilience for communities in Romania. Our organization was part of the strategy’s implementation monitoring team, a role in which we closely aligned with institutional efforts.

There is a tremendous amount of work needed to reduce seismic risk in Romania, requiring efforts from many institutions as well as civil society. In 2023, we worked alongside Code4Romania, as part of a project supported by the Bucharest Community Foundation through the Bucharest Prepared program, to develop the platform e-cutremur.ro. This remains an integrative content platform managed by Code4Romania, addressing seismic risk management in all its four dimensions: (1) risk awareness and reduction, (2) emergency preparedness, (3) emergency response, and (4) post-disaster recovery. It is a ready-to-launch civic platform designed to integrate and coordinate information, also serving to support response and recovery interventions in the event of an earthquake.

As part of the same project, we launched two informational brochures for homeowners and tenants in Bucharest, with information applicable throughout the rest of the country exposed to seismic risk. We are also publicly launching the website www.acasainsiguranta.ro, developed together with Code4Romania. This is a resource page for homeowners, homeowner associations, and condominium administrators in the country to raise awareness about seismic risk and earthquake-vulnerable housing. Our goal is to reach as many homeowners of potentially seismically vulnerable housing across the country as possible through a network of partners and to drive action toward expert assessment and reinforcement. We remain open to collaborative actions to enhance and promote this site that incorporates the resources we developed in previous years.

The brochures are only available in Romanian for now.

Check out www.acasainsiguranta.ro an follow us on Acasă, în siguranță. (Romanian only)