A powerful magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck central Croatia on Tuesday, according to the US Geological Survey, with local rescuers reporting widespread damage near the epicenter in and around Petrinja City.
The extent of the victims was not known. There were reports that the earthquake, which occurred just after noon, local time, could be felt in all the Balkans and in distant places like Hungary.
Petrinja Mayor Darinko Dumbovic told regional broadcaster N1 that “the city has been destroyed and that at least one person has been killed, a 12-year-old girl, whose body he said was on the street.
“This is a catastrophe,” he said. “My city is completely destroyed.”
“We need firefighters, we don’t know what’s under the surfaces, the roof of a car has fallen, we need help,” he said in an emotional telephone interview of the scene that was broadcast on Croatian state television.
“Mothers cry for their children,” he said.
Images of the scene on social media and local television stations showed rubble-covered streets, buildings with collapsed roofs and rescue workers running through the streets. In a scene captured by local television crews, a man and a child were removed from a car buried under the rubble and rushed to the hospital.
The mayor told local reporters that he did not know the conditions of the two people.
“I also heard that the kindergarten has collapsed,” he said. “But luckily, there were no children” in the building at the time, he said.
Petrinja is about 30 miles southeast of Zagreb, the capital, where buildings have been rocked and broken window debris and damaged structures have spread across the streets.
The Red Cross in Croatia said it was a “very serious” situation.
It was the second earthquake to hit the area the day before, after a 5.2-degree earthquake on Monday morning damaged buildings and fueled fears in a region with a history of seismic activity.
This came just hours after Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic and President Zoran Milanovic visited the center of Petrinja to examine the damage from the first earthquake.
Although the first quake caused no injuries, Mayor Dumbovic said many buildings had been damaged, putting them in poor condition when the second earthquake struck.
He said there had been several small earthquakes in the past few days and that many residents were afraid to spend the night at their homes.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said she asked Janez Lenarcic, the European commissioner for crisis management, to prepare to travel to Croatia for assistance.
The region is prone to earthquakes, and experts have warned that the Balkan nations in southeastern Europe have failed to deal with the risks posed by old buildings.
Although many cities and towns have their roots hundreds of years ago, a construction boom that occurred in the 1990s, during the transition from communism to capitalism, often saw structures built without regard for security standards.
The result is that millions of people live in homes with little chance of surviving a major earthquake, experts say.
In Croatia, scars from previous earthquakes are still visible in places like Dubrovnik, where almost a third of the city was razed in 1667 and more than 5,000 people died.
Alisa Dogramadzieva and Joe Orovic contributed to the report.