House of Cards:
A shaken friend called at around 2am yesterday morning. She was spending the night at another friend’s place, after a rather significant portion of her apartment’s kitchen floor had fallen through to the apartment below! “Hope you didn’t lose the fridge”, is about all I could offer.
The most likely explanation for the incident? Something to do with the tenants in the apartment below hers I’ll bet. Having decided they’d like taller ceilings, for the last week-and-a-half they’ve been jack-hammering away at lowering the floor. Maybe removing 12cm of concrete around the supporting walls compromised the structural integrity of the wall, or perhaps the vibrations had shaken something loose. At any rate, she’s given notice and will be moving her stuff out this afternoon.
If this is anything to go by, I shudder to think of how disastrous the next powerful earthquake will be for Bucharest. Romania suffers at least one major earthquake every hundred years, and many significant ones in between (four ranging between 6.4 and 6.9 in the 1990s). In 1977, more than 1,500 people died and 11,000 were injured in an earthquake measuring 7.4 on the richter scale. The city’s significant population growth since then (forced urbanization during communist times, and the continued pull to the cities for those from rural areas seeking employment), and the laughable seizmic integrity of the already-crumbling Communist-era apartment blocks that almost all residents live can only spell catastrophe.
