The earthquake that hit Romania on Tuesday night was a reminder to Romanians of the nightmarish images of 1977. The antidote to fear - insurance - is still being administered in microscopic doses.
Not even in Focsani, where the earthquake is thought to have hit hardest, was there a rush the next day to take out home insurance. The number of people signing insurance contracts yesterday was no bigger than normal.
"Nobody came in this sWednesdayt morning to take out earthquake insurance. Insurance coverage sthe number of insured homes from the total number of homest in our city is about 5-8%. This probably means that people have got used to the quakes and that they do not understand that with insurance you can have damaged goods replaced right away," explained Dan Ulei, manager of the Allianz-Tiriac's insurance office in Focsani.
The same was true of Bucharest. "We had no requests today," said Ana Maria Bartic, manager of Omniasig's 13 Septembrie office.
Of the city's 8.1 million homes, only 7% or around 600,000 are thought to be insured. However, nobody has exact statistics for the number of insured homes, not even the Insurance Supervision Commission.
The annual premium for insurance for earthquake, fire and other forms of damage for a 30,000 euro home comes to about 100-120 euros per year, or 10 euros a month.
In the spring of 2002, the Government released a draft law to make this type of insurance mandatory as part of a programme devised with the World Bank. Government insistence that a state-owned company be involved in the project was not agreed to by insurers and the World Bank and the project duly failed. Since the programme required massive subsidies for people unable to afford the insurance, the Government at first insisted a state-owned insurer be set up for this purpose. Later it was planned to involve the Romanian Savings Bank, known in Romanian as Casa de Economii si Consematiuni (CEC).
Caseta
Shortly after the earthquake, Romanian landline and mobile telephone networks experienced a surge in traffic for both voice calls and SMS text messages. RomTelecom officials announced a tenfold increase in traffic compared with a normal day, a level normally only seen on days such as New Year's Eve. Mobile operators Orange, Connex and Zapp enjoyed an increase in the number of calls of 150-200% on the day before, St. Dumitru's Day, which had three times the normal number of calls, making the increase similar to that seen by RomTelecom. Romtelecom officials said they experienced no problems with their network. Orange and Connex, however, admitted the high number of calls had caused some network congestion, especially in Bucharest.
sorin.pislaru@zf.ro ; dan.dragomir@zf.ro
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