RUMANIA: Quake and Answer

Earthquakes of Intensity Seven are bad.* The one that shook Adolf (Providence-Is-With-Me) Hitler’s latest victim, Rumania, last weekend was not a seven or eight but an Intensity Nine lateral quake that caused the ground to shift back & forth like corn in a popper. “It was like being on top of a poplar tree … in a high wind,” cabled a reporter.

The Bucharest blackout was suddenly illuminated by the blinding flash of blue light which accompanies the first wave of an earthquake. Then came a series of violent shocks accompanied by the ripping, crashing noise of falling buildings and the screams of people. In five minutes more damage was caused than the Luftwaffe has accomplished in London since the war began. Scarcely a building in the entire city was unscarred. “I had noticed a young couple kissing in an automobile. . . . They are somewhere under there now,” stuttered a chalk-faced newsboy, pointing in the street to a mountainous pile of masonry that minutes before had been Bucharest’s elite, 13-story Carlton apartment house. More than 300 were believed buried in its ruins. A few gained the air-raid cellar and called frantically for aid over a still live telephone wire. Then the oil tanks of the central-heating plant exploded, bathing the rubble in flames. Nearly 100 prisoners saw the walls and ceiling of their cells cave in on them as the Doflana prison was shaken to the ground. Thousands of German troops. Iron Guardists, Rumanian soldiers and civilians worked frantically to extricate victims.

Focsani, 100 miles northeast of Bucharest and the epicentre of the quake, was reported in ruins; Galatz, site of the German submarine base, suffered severely; and Giurgiu, principal oil port on the Danube, saw public buildings and factories reduced to mangled heaps. In Campina, thickly populated oil town, refinery chimneys toppled, houses collapsed, and pipelines burst, dousing the ground with a gummy and inflammable threat. In the heavily guarded Ploesti field a few fires broke out, were later reported extinguished. Buckled tracks, collapsed bridges, severed telephone cables and German censorship stopped traffic and disrupted communications throughout Rumania, prevented the true extent of destruction from becoming known.

But word slowly got round that Providence had answered Adolf Hitler.

*On the Rossi-Forel scale, Intensity Ten is tops.