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

Still bleeding, the gash on his hand covered in dirty gauze, Xhafer Ahmetaj surveyed the mountain of rubble where his friends had been buried after an earthquake struck in November.

Only one teenage boy was pulled out alive. Eight other members of the Lala family, including two toddlers, were killed in the 6.4 magnitude quake. Ahmetaj, 79, a former military officer, took in the devastation and shook his head.

Nature, at its most violent, was to blame. But so, too, were people at their most greedy.

“If you would have seen this place when it was a marsh, a place where people came to fish, you wouldn’t think houses could ever have been built here,” Ahmetaj said. Yet they were built — the construction often compromised by corruption — in a pattern repeated across Albania, a small Balkan nation.

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 southeastern Europe, successive governments have failed to address the risks posed by aging 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 nongovernmental organization focused on reducing seismic risk. “We know about another 1,600 buildings, and we don’t know how many others there are. But we are pretending that we need to resurvey them because, who knows, maybe they got stronger in the past 25 years.”

“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 Mar 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 100 miles 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,” 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.”

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.”

In Romania, the oldest buildings often pose the greatest risk. But in other countries, like Albania, it is more recent construction that worries many experts.

When a relatively mild 5.7 magnitude earthquake shook Bulgaria in 1986, the damage far exceeded what might have been expected.

In the small town of Strazhitsain, in the country’s north, scores of houses were destroyed and most of those left standing were deemed unsafe to occupy.

Thousands were made homeless.

Since 2007, when Bulgaria joined the European Union, construction in the country has had to comply with the bloc’s requirements for earthquake resistance.

However, much of the construction dates back to communist times, when authorities responded to urgent housing needs by erecting giant precast-panel residential complexes.

Built correctly and with proper maintenance, such structures might not pose an outsized risk. But that was often not the case.

Then, in the 1990s, after the collapse of communism, speculators rushed in and construction boomed.

Peter Pavlov, director of the Centre for Seismic Engineering at the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy in Sofia, said that while he believes the country is better prepared than some of its neighbours, big questions remain, especially regarding the newer stock of buildings.

“Some of the ground floors of those buildings got converted into stores and they added an extra floor on top of the building which might be considered an earthquake hazard,” he explained in a phone interview, just hours before a trip to Albania to evaluate whether some of the homes damaged by the November quake could be habitable again.

Pavlov called for setting up a national seismic laboratory whose task would be to test the resistance of buildings.

The initiative echoed the warnings of a recent report by the World Bank, which called the lack of knowledge about the seismic safety of old residential buildings in Bulgaria “a pressing matter.”

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, as if shoved out of the earth.

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.

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 centered in Montenegro in 1979, which affected nearly the entire Adriatic coast.

“That was a whole new category,” 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 $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 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 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.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service