An earthquake hit Romania on Wednesday night, shaking buildings in the capital Bucharest but apparently causing little damage, Reuters witnesses said.
Hundreds of people called emergency services soon after the quake struck at 11:24 p.m. (4:24 p.m. EDT), but ambulance officials told Reuters nearly all of them were suffering panic attacks and it seemed there were no serious casualties.
\"It was very scary. My mother lives on the 7th floor and it was awful. She called me on the phone crying,\" one resident in the capital, Sanda Voicu, 52, said.
Bucharest\'s streets were mainly calm, but some people gathered on main avenues in their nightclothes, waiting for news and trying to find out what had happened.
Experts at the National Seismology Institute in Bucharest said the quake struck in Vrancea, about 150 miles north of Bucharest and a center of seismic activity in the country.
\"The depth was 100 km (62 miles) and the intensity was 5.8 on the Richter scale,\" the institute\'s Adrian Grigore told Realitatea television. \"Such earthquakes are usually followed by tremors or aftershocks of a lesser magnitude.\"
In 1977, a quake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale killed more than 1,000 people in the Vrancea area.
The U.S. Geological Survey Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colorado, reported similar readings, giving a magnitude of 5.7. Earlier estimates put the magnitude at 6.
U.S. geophysicist John Bellini told Reuters it was a moderate earthquake of a depth typical for that area.
Romanian television reported quake had been felt as far away as neighboring Moldova, some 120 miles to the east of Vrancea.
\"No victims or collapsed buildings have been reported in Bucharest so far but we have been flooded with phone calls from people asking if they should abandon their homes,\" a police emergency center spokesman said.
An ambulance controller in the capital added: \"We got about 300 phone calls, mostly from people having panic attacks in the first hour after the quake.\"
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Dumitru Marcel, said so far not there had been no reports of significant damage.
Witnesses said cracks had appeared in Bucharest\'s historic City Hall and plaster was falling off. Residents feared they would see more evidence of damage at first light. Money for repairs, particularly on older buildings, has been tight amid the economic hardships that followed the collapse of communism.
In Braila, eastern Romania, the wall of an abandoned building collapsed and the windows of office building had been shattered, the Interior Ministry\'s Marcel added.
Bulgarian civil defense officials said the tremors had been felt on their side of the border, but it was too early to tell if there was any significant damage in the country.
