Buildings built in Bulgaria after 2012 are the most resistant to earthquakes, Bulgarian National Radio reports on February 7.
The Bulgarian city of Varna entered the seismic zone in 1987.
For north-eastern Bulgaria, the Vrancea region is of great importance, Svetlana Nikolcheva from the Chamber of Investment Design Engineers told Radio Varna.
Varna is located in the seventh zone of seismic activity. The eighth zone starts from the “Bitter Spring” and goes north, includes Balchik and Kranevo. The Shabla area has the highest activity – 9th place on the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik scale. In Shabla, the number is higher due to the presence of a local outbreak, Nikolcheva explained.
In the images of the earthquake in Turkey, it can be seen that the vertical elements, whose dimensions allow to resist seismic impacts, are absent or very weak:
“They are like a cake: the layers are visible and everything is squashed between them. Talk about bad design.”.
Panel houses in Bulgaria are resistant to seismic impacts. Monolithic buildings are also durable if they are the right size and of good quality.
After 2012, the Eurocode for the dimensions of building structures began to be calculated for taller buildings, and the requirements for vertical elements became even higher. With high-quality construction and invested materials, they are much more environmentally friendly than houses built in the 1990s,” says engineer Nikolcheva.
Most of the houses in towns and holiday villages are unstable during shallow earthquakes, because they were not built according to the rules.
Engineer Nikolcheva commented that there are times when the technical inspection of buildings is carried out formally and, moreover, it costs money:
“Sometimes you have to touch here and there to see what’s behind the cast, but the townspeople won’t let you. There are technical passports that do not even correspond to the building”.
Bulgaria lacks organization and plans to deal with earthquakes. The population is also not trained on what to do in the event of such a disaster, says engineer Svetlana Nikolcheva of the Chamber of Investment Design Engineers in Varna.
Source: Rossa Primavera
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