A Bad Dream Comes True

"I keep thinking I shall awake soon from a bad dream." So said a young Rumanian last week, as he watched bulldozers and mechanical shovels snarl and roar through the debris in downtown Bucharest caused by the most devastating earthquake in the country's history (TIME, March 14). Rumanian President Nicolae Ceausescu announced that the death toll for the country had reached 1,387; he estimated the number of wounded at 10,500, including 2,500 who were still hospitalized. The 20-second quake, which registered 7.2 on the Richter scale and was followed by 20 minutes of reverberations, had wiped out about 20,000 houses and apartments, leaving at least 18,000 families homeless.

"There were astonishing tales of survival," reported TIME Correspondent David Aikman from Bucharest. "One woman breast-fed her baby while trapped for 80 hours, only to lose it at the moment of rescue from under tons of debris. A stunt man climbed precariously into a totally demolished building to look for survivors--but not until he had told bystanders that he was absolving them from responsibility for whatever calamity might befall him in the search."

A disproportionate number of the dead were members of the literary and professional elite of Bucharest--the "Paris of eastern Europe," which in Aikman's words "now resembles the movie set of Earthquake." Poetess Veronica Porumbacu, popular Writer Alexandru Ivasiuc, Singer Doina Badea--all had perished, along with a host of privileged bureaucrats, scientists and educators who could afford fashionable apartments in the 32 tall buildings flattened in the heart of the city. At the city morgue hundreds of bodies lay in plastic sacks for long lines of friends and relatives to try to identify. "Is Caragiu there?" asked a middle-aged woman plaintively, looking for the remains of Rumania's best-known comedian, Toma Caragiu. It was believed that he had been at home reviewing a script with Film Director Alexandru Bocanet when the walls shuddered and crumbled.

Rumanian authorities estimated economic losses at only $500 million, a figure that some foreign observers thought was too low. The tremors had seriously damaged 200 major industries and set off fires in the big petrochemical complexes near oil-rich Ploesti, 38 miles north of Bucharest; the quake had also ripped up oil rigs and killed "tens of thousands" of farm animals.

No Thanks. President Ceausescu, who was displayed prominently on state-run television visiting hospitals and issuing decrees, insisted that the nation would still fulfill its new five-year plan, contrived to pull the populace from agrarian poverty and bolster efforts to stave off Soviet economic domination. At his press conference he thanked President Carter for a telegram of sympathy but only grudgingly acknowledged some $80,000 in American assistance. He offered no public thanks at all for donations from the Soviet Union, one of a dozen other aid-giving countries. Nor did he seem grateful for a U.S. Geological Survey report, relayed by U.S. Ambassador Harry G. Barnes Jr., warning that a second major shock might hit the same area. "It cannot do good," huffed Ceausescu, anxious to prevent panic. Privately, officials took the study seriously. Its key recommendation: install high-powered seismographs needed to provide enough notice for people to leave homes and offices before their world again crashed around them.

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