The head of the emergency department, Raed Arafat, announced on Saturday the release of a guide with information on how to respond in the event of a natural disaster, saying it would be distributed mainly in rural areas. In the event of a strong earthquake, Arafat said that the population should use the phone as little as possible and take their time to use cars to leave the roads free for rescuers.

• “This guide contains a lot of information from what is on fiipregătit.ro, but there is also additional information about disinformation, about cyber security.
• The purpose of this guide is to print and distribute it, especially in rural areas, where the population does not have access to what we have on the Internet, what we have on the portal fiipregatit.ro.
• It will supplement, it contains additional data that we will also fill in the fiipregatit portal, and this is one of the additional methods of training the population,” Raed Arafat said on Saturday at TVR Info, news.ro writes.

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Arafat also gave some advice on what to do after the earthquake.

• “For example, immediately after an earthquake, we recommend using the phone as little as possible and only for urgent matters. We all don’t get in our cars and drive because we block the roads for rescue teams.
• The first thing we should do is check on our neighbors, check on those around us and help them.
• The one who is in the community is the first to provide first aid to the neighbor until management and response teams arrive. (…)
• If it’s daytime, the child is at school, one family member is at work in one place, the other is at another job, they need to know where they will meet to determine if we will have the essence of meeting in that place,” Raed Arafat also relayed .

He also stated that Ro-Alert can come with messages after an earthquake, but people need to prepare for a disaster, not during it.

• “To prepare the public and inform them in real time, we have a Ro-Alert system that can send messages immediately after an earthquake, and we also have a DSU app.
• I advised everyone to download, you can enter without authorization. The DSU app reproduces some aspects from fiipregatit.ro, there is a link to it, but there is also a lot of other information, and especially through this app you can receive information and alerts that do not necessarily require us to call a Ro-Alert, but which are interest for the population.
• Every single person, their role is to look for the information we give them, know it in advance, we don’t inform ourselves during a disaster, we inform ourselves before, we don’t prepare during a disaster, we prepare before and after to listen to the advice of the authorities,” said the head of the DSU.

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Magnitude 8 earthquake scenario

The head of the Department of Emergency Situations, Raed Arafat, also announced that rescue teams are taking into account the worst-case scenario in the exercises they are conducting, noting that they are also preparing for an earthquake of magnitude 8, clarifying that this does not mean that something will happen, but it also must train for such a scenario.

“To intervene after the earthquake, we have a concept, a concept that has been updated, we had a very large-scale exercise, the largest European earthquake exercise involving a very large number of people and with simulations that lasted five days and four nights – the exercise Seism 2018, which we conducted and from which we learned a lot, and that thanks to these exercises we have changed our legislation to make it easier for us to make decisions during an earthquake. Such exercises will be repeated, we will redo them, make them smaller in area, maybe we will make them bigger in the next year, two, three, we will have to repeat an exercise similar to the one in 2018 to see what else we learned and prepare our intervention forces,” Arafat also said.

He specified that the most unfavorable scenario is taken into account in these exercises.

“We are forced to follow the most unfavorable scenario, most of the time. This is how we prepare. But we always hope for a better scenario, but in preparation you can’t prepare for the best scenario, you have to prepare for the least likely scenario, the scenario that can test you the most. In our scenarios, we also consider the possibility of an 8-degree earthquake, this does not mean that we know that it will happen, it does not mean that it will necessarily happen, but we need to prepare for this,” explained the head of DSU.