Word: bucharest
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...Raid. In Bucharest, thousands were homeless. Many of the terrified survivors streamed into suburban parks and the surrounding countryside in fear of further tremors. An employee at the Austrian embassy in Bucharest reported that there were "rifts and holes more than a meter wide in other houses. Heaps of rubbish lay in the streets. It was sheer madness...
...tragedy could have been much worse. Although one Western diplomat in Bucharest said that "the center of the town looked as though an air raid had hit it," TIME's Richard Gross cabled that relatively few buildings were actually flattened. "Most of those that were damaged had their roofs or top floors shaken loose. The rubble bombarded residents, who fled to the streets in panic. Motorists, not knowing where to flee, drove around in circles for hours in panic, creating horrendous traffic jams in a city where most people are too poor to afford cars. Yet U.S. embassy officials...
...epicenter of the quake was roughly 100 miles north of Bucharest, in the Vrancea mountain range of the breathtakingly beautiful Transylvanian Alps. One town near the center: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, home of Olympic Gymnast Nadia Comaneci. (Comaneci's whereabouts after the quake were unknown, but she was presumed safe.) The area is well known to seismologists as an active earthquake zone; as many as 200 minor tremors may be recorded annually. Rumania's worst previous earthquake, in fact, centered on the same spot in 1940, damaging the same major centers and leaving about 400 dead...
Within 20 minutes of the quake, rescue crews were on the streets of Bucharest. President Nicolae Ceausescu cut short a five-nation tour of Africa and hastily summoned a meeting of Rumania's Political Executive Committee. The group decreed a state of emergency, requisitioned food stocks, shut off all gas mains in the capital, and closed the university, presumably to create temporary shelter for the homeless and wounded. Troops cordoned off major portions of the downtown area to protect people from falling masonry, and possibly to prevent looting. Sports stadiums in the city were converted into makeshift hospitals...
...Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Luxembourg. The Swiss offered to send specially trained dog teams to help sniff out any remaining bodies. But while digging out from the disaster, President Ceausescu still had time to order an investigation into shoddy construction practices revealed by the earthquake on the outskirts of Bucharest, where new and ostensibly sturdy buildings developed glaring cracks in their walls...