Combined with the lack of a clear planar zone of seismicity that would be expected for a subducting slab, this is consistent with some form of delamination.

[11] A day later, in the afternoon of 9 November there were several weak and local earthquakes, around the town of Panciu, movements which passed almost unnoticed by the population (II–III degrees on the Mercalli intensity scale).

[1] The earthquake was felt in Bucharest, where 267 people were killed in the collapse of Carlton Bloc,[13][14] a 14-story reinforced concrete structure, the tallest building in the city at the time.

The American Embassy, the Post's hotel, the building of the Ministry of Agriculture and that of the General Staff were reported destroyed.

[7] The Romanian General Association of Engineers undertook a detailed study of earthquake effects on reinforced concrete buildings.

[citation needed] Focșani, a city 150 kilometres (93 mi) northeast of Bucharest and the epicentre of the quake, was reported in ruins;[11] 90% of Panciu was destroyed,[3] although most of the buildings were made of wood, and the number of casualties is uncertain (22 to 62 deaths, 54 to 300 injured);[16] Galați, the site of the German submarine base, also suffered severely; and Giurgiu, the principal oil port on the Danube, saw public buildings and factories completely destroyed.

In Câmpina, a densely populated oil town, refinery chimneys toppled, houses collapsed, and pipelines burst, dousing the ground with a sticky and inflammable threat.

[17] The earthquake also caused significant morphological effects in the Earth's crust, especially in the sub-Carpathian regions of Wallachia and Moldavia; these effects manifested by landslides, fissures, settlements, formation of cracks in the surface layers of the crust, water spurting from cracks formed alongside rivers.

[6] After the emergency response phase, Tillotson (1940) gave many details of the effects of the earthquake around the country and said that due to telecommunications still interrupted a conservative estimate would place the casualties at 400 killed and 800 severely injured in Romania, with more than 150 killed in Bucharest where 30 or more were still trapped under the debris of Carlton and more than one thousand badly damaged houses had to be evacuated.