Emergency Situations

The Government in Bucharest has adopted an emergency ordinance whereby setting up an emergency response unit in case of severe weather. The unit will operate under the supervision of the Interior Ministry, but will serve to liaise with other ministry departments. Following this decision, the Deputy Prime Minister for National Security will oversee emergency response operations, while State Secretary Raed Arafat will coordinate any weather-related emergencies.

Leyla Cheamil, 30.01.2014, 13:20

Also worth mentioning is that Dr. Raed Arafat was the one who set up the Mobile Emergency Service for Resuscitation and Extrication, in short SMURD, in the 1990s. For his remarkable feats in emergency response medical care, Arafat received important awards from the Romanian state in 2003 and 2005 respectively.

The Government’s emergency ordinance thus comes to modify the functioning and coordination of public institutions. Prime Minister Victor Ponta said this would help save time and energy with red tape. The Prime Minister said the current system was inefficient, given that the Interior Minister had to coordinate certain institutions that fall within the remit of other state ministries, such as, for instance, the Special Telecommunications Service.

The ministries, SMURD, the Emergency Situations Inspectorate as well as other institutions and authorities must all function and work under the authority of a single person, so as to ensure a more efficient response on the ground. The re-classification of responsibilities and instructions in cases of emergency follows the Prime Minister’s recent disapproval of the authorities’ intervention in last week’s plane crash in the Apuseni Mountains.

The small plane carried a group of doctors specialising in transplant surgery from Bucharest to Oradea, in the northwest. The crash site was found after seven hours of searches involving the participation of fire fighters, police officers, mountain rescue teams and locals. Despite state-of-the-art technology, the first man on site was a local, which is why the Prime Minister has labelled rescue operations a complete failure.

The plane accident also resulted in resignations and dismissals. Criticized for how his Ministry acted between the time of the crash and the hours that followed, Interior Minister Radu Stroe stepped down. In turn, the Executive Director and Operations Manager of the Romanian Air Traffic Service Administration, as well as the head of the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations tendered their resignations.