A Review of Socio-Economic Consequences, Losses and Human Casualties of the 1977 Vrancea, Romania Earthquake

Abstract

Although its socio-economic disaster pattern was obvious, the March 4, 1977 Vrancea, Romania earthquake was studied mainly in seismological and earthquake engineering terms. In 1977, the loss data released in Romania, referred to 32,900 collapsed or heavily damaged dwellings, 35,000 homeless families, thousands of damaged buildings, many other damages and destructions in industry and economy, 1,578 people killed, 11,321 people injured (with 90% of the killed and 67% of the injured being in the city of Bucharest). The Romanian government reported the economic losses from this event in December 1977, as being US$ 2 billion. For a long time, the evaluation of human casualties vs. collapse pattern of buildings in 1977 was not addressed and we still miss integral data. The recovery and reevaluation of economic and social impacts of the 1977 disaster was a concern of the authors, with the intent to better understand its consequences and prepare a new strategy of seismic risk reduction in view of future earthquakes in Romania, and in order to fill that gap the authors recovered many unpublished and obscure data.

Keywords

• building damage
• collapse and casualty patterns
• territorial loss distribution