Romania Interior Min, Telecom Operators To Convene Monday Over Quake-Related Malfunctions

Nica said Monday, after the meeting of the National Committee for Emergency, that at least calls to the police, gendarmerie, the inspectorate for emergency and the ambulance should have been secured.

Moreover, Nica said he wants to know why the security communications system, able to take calls from 120,000 users, was not used either.

Nica said it is only natural that the flood of calls trigger interruptions and malfunctions, yet, he stressed it is abnormal that a phone conversation be interrupted in a life and death situation, adding he was having a phone conservation when the quake occurred, which he could no longer carry out.

At Nica’s request, the country’s communications regulator ANCOM will conduct checkups in this respect.

Nica met Sunday morning with the regulator’s head Catalin Marinescu and asked the latter to order in-depth checkups in a bid to establish what triggered malfunctions in telephony networks after the low-intensity earthquake.

Telephony operators said the flood of calls at the same time triggered the unfortunate “traffic congestion” and stressed it is only natural in this kind of situations when too many calls are made at the same time.

The earthquake of a 5.3 degrees magnitude on the Richter scale occurred 120 kilometers deep in the eastern Romanian area of Vrancea and was felt in capital city Bucharest with an intensity of 3-4 degrees on the Mercalli scale.

According to the Romanian Earth Physics Research Institute, the quake’s maximum amplitude was of about three minutes. There were no aftershocks.

The quake was also felt in the Republic of Moldova and northern Bulgaria.