Magnitude 6.0 - Earthquake in Vrancea region (Romania)

    The earthquake was felt within 200 km distance from the epicentre. It caused no serious injuries for people.

    The distribution of the maximum horizontal acceleration (PGA) (Bonjer et al., 2005) is deduced on the basis of the data recorded by the joint free-field K2 seismic network of CRC461 and National Institute for Earth Physics (Bonjer et al., 2000; Rizescu et al., 2002) on the Romanian territory. 38 K2 accelerometers properly recorded the earthquake.

    The ground motion is linearly interpolated between the stations. The PGA distribution is principally extending on a NE-SW direction with two maxima located symmetrically relative to the epicentre, which seems to be a typical distribution for the Vrancea intermediate-depth earthquakes (Mandrescu, 1988; Mandrescu and Radulian, 1999; Sokolov et al., 2004). Although the extension to the NE is more pronounced, the highest seismic radiation is noticed towards SW, in the Ploesti area (the maximum measured acceleration was 264 cm/s2 at station SEC located about 100 km SW from the epicentre). The northern part of the 50 cm/s2 contour line is not well constrained by data, but is fixed through predicted values at the map border. These boundary values were calculated using the attenuation law of Moldovan et al. (2000). In Table 1 are shown the maximum accelerations and velocities recorded on both horizontal components.