Marijana Gašović from Kraljevo remembers few nights like those between November 2 and 3, 2010.
13 years ago, Marijana and her husband just moved into a rented apartment on the fourth floor, in which there was only a double bed.
At one hour and 56 minutes past midnight on November 3, the couple were awakened by a "creepy roar".
"Everything just started shaking, my husband threw himself at me, I screamed, but I couldn't hear myself.
"Our double bed was against the wall, and after three or four minutes it was in the middle of the room," she told the BBC in Serbian about the 5,4 magnitude earthquake that hit Kraljevo, in central Serbia.
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Two people died in the earthquake, an eye was injured 180, and 25.000 buildings were damaged, of which only residential buildings suffered damage of 2,5 billion dinars.
Although the Balkans is a seismically active area, which is why strong earthquakes can be expected in the future, in most countries of the former Yugoslavia, the capacities of seismological services are decreasing.
It is in Serbia in October 2023 only one person worked is in seismological work at the Republic Seismological Institute.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, two seismologists worked at the Federal Hydrometeorological Institute, within which there is a seismological service, they told the BBC in Serbian from this institution.
It is somewhat better in North Macedonia and Montenegro, but these countries are also facing an outflow of personnel.
In Croatia, they currently have the most experts and equipment, but, as BBC interlocutors say in Serbian, "thankfully" the earthquake that hit Petrinja in 2020, when seven people died.
"Cycles of interest and significant investments in seismology are closely related to the occurrence of strong earthquakes, which result in greater human and material losses," says Dejan Valčić, acting director of the Republic Seismological Institute in Serbia.
Seismologist Ana Mladenović says that earthquakes of similar magnitude as in Kraljevo can be expected in the future in central Serbia, and the same is confirmed by experts from the neighborhood.
"There will be earthquakes in Serbia, but not as strong as in other countries.
"Its to much more seismically active area in Albania, Croatia and Montenegro," says Macedonian seismologist Mihail Garevski.
'None passed the competition'
When the earthquake hit Kraljevo on November 3, 2010, seismologist Ana Mladenović had just graduated from the Faculty of Mining and Geology on the subject of the structural-tectonic model of the Kraljevo-Cačan basin.
The earthquake, the consequences of which were felt by about 80,000 residents of Kraljevo and surrounding towns, surprised many geologists, he says.
"The surprise was due to the fact that the seismologists working at the Republic Seismological Institute did not get to engage in scientific work and thus share information with the rest of the scientific community," says Mladenović, who works as a research associate at the Faculty of Mining and Geology.
Even in 2010, there were not enough of them, and in the following years even that small number continued to fall, until it fell to one person.
U To the informant about the work it is stated that the Institute should have 12 employees, and that six positions have been filled.
Three years ago, when there were eight employees, u Report on the work of this institution it was stated that "the reduction in the number of employees called into question not only the functioning of the seismological service, but also the purpose of the existence of this state body that performs the tasks of defending one of the disasters".
Dejan Valčić, acting director of the Republic Seismological Institute, says that the current number of employees is the result of several factors - from a multi-year ban on employment, through natural retirements, to "weak interest of younger colleagues".
"In the current year, so far five public competitions have been announced, where either a very small number of candidates or no one has applied.
"Of the registered candidates, none of them passed the basic tests of functional competence, and the same was true in 2021 and 2022," he told the BBC in Serbian.
Seismologist Jadranka Mihaljević, head of the Department of Instrumental and Engineering Seismology at the Institute for Hydrometeorology and Seismology in Montenegro, explains that the circumstances in which the Serbian institute found itself are not unusual for the Balkans.
"A few years ago, Skopje was in a similar situation, now it's Belgrade, in a few years it could be Podgorica, and all this is a consequence of the lack of a clear plan to maintain the profession," she says.
Mihaljević points out that the job of a seismologist is specific and that the problem is that the institutes do not have a well-regulated status.
"It is difficult to hire someone as if they were an ordinary employee, and they will work many days a year, on weekends, a job that lasts 24 hours seven days a week, and this is not written anywhere and is not regulated by status," she says.
Therefore, it is not surprising that "people are looking for better opportunities", he adds.
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'There must be a disaster'
The earthquake in Petrinja, Croatia on December 29, 2020 at 12:20 p.m. found Tomislav Fiket, deputy director of the Seismological Service of Croatia, in the basement of Andrija Mohorovčić's memorial premises.
Andrija Mohorovčić was one of the leading seismologists of the 19th and 20th centuries, thanks to whose legacy the University of Zagreb is one of the few where it is possible to study seismology at the undergraduate level.
"We were standing next to glass cases with historical seismometers when it started shaking.
"It shook so hard that at first I thought it was an earthquake in Zagreb," says the BBC interviewer in Serbian.
It turned out that the epicenter is near the town of Petrinja, with 25.000 inhabitants, about 60 kilometers from Zagreb.
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It was not unusual that Fickett first thought that the capital of Croatia had shaken - just eight months earlier, an earthquake happened in Zagreb magnitude 5,5 on the Richter scale, and on the same day an earthquake of magnitude 4,8 followed.
A little girl was killed then, and 30 people were injured.
"We immediately started working and collecting data.
"Unfortunately, nothing happened that we're not used to," he says.
One year after the Petrin earthquake, in an interview with facttograf.hr, Fickett explained that the Seismological Service does not have the equipment to monitor weak earthquakes in this area.
Monitoring these tremors was necessary to obtain information on how and where to build in the years to come.
However, all the instruments were installed on the territory of Zagreb.
Shortly after this conversation, the Croatian government gave half a million euros to the seismological service for the purchase of equipment.
"This is not the case only here, but also in other countries.
"Unfortunately, you have to wait for an earthquake to open your financial structure," says Fickett.
In addition to government assistance, a European Union project of 15 million euros was also approved, through which nine young experts were employed.
New staff, however, is becoming increasingly difficult to find, says Fickett.
"I was convinced that after the earthquake, interest in seismology would increase, but that did not happen.
"The situation is unchanged, maybe even worse," he points out.
He believes that young people don't opt for this field because they don't have many opportunities to find a job because it's mostly government services where "salaries are not promising".
Watch the video: Crater in Croatia after the earthquake
Why do we need seismologists?
In the days that followed the earthquake in Kraljevo, Ana Mladenović collaborated with the seismological institute to collect and process data.
"It was hard and painstaking work to find an answer to the question of what happened in Kraljevo, which faults were responsible for that main earthquake," says Mladenović.
While it is important for the scientific community to have answers to these questions, citizens are interested in whether seismologists can warn them of earthquakes in time.
"We cannot say in advance when there will be an earthquake, but based on the study of earthquakes that happened in the past, we can know how seismic activity will take place in similar areas," the BBC interviewee said in Serbian.
Another important role of seismologists is to influence building codes to ensure that buildings can withstand earthquakes of varying magnitudes, she adds.
Seismologists are often able to say that "people are not killed by earthquakes, but by bad construction", which is why they should give instructions on how to build according to the risk of an earthquake.
"What we build today will remain in fifty or a hundred years. However, under the pressure of the market to build as much as possible, common sense is lost.
"This raises the question of whether we want the law on planning and construction to only nominally have a seismic protection component or to clearly prescribe obligations," says Jadranka Mihaljević.
In addition to low-quality construction, high density also increases the risk, he warns, because "if an earthquake happens and you have an overpopulated place, it becomes difficult to evacuate people, have efficient transport, protect critical infrastructure".
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Who can be a seismologist?
According to the internal regulations of the Republic Seismological Institute in Serbia, seismological work can be performed by people who have graduated from the Faculty of Mining and Geology, Physics and Mathematics.
The only employee who worked as a seismologist at the Institute in October is a graduate physicist.
In the earlier one in an interview with Radio Free Europe, Dejan Valčić said that he has undergone the necessary training in the country and abroad in order to be able to deal with seismological work.
Some experts, however, claim that seismology is seriously studied only at the Faculty of Mining and Geology at the Department of Geophysics, and that students at other faculties have no contact with this field.
The fact that, according to some systematization (in the Serbian institute), one or the other can be employed, that's nice and those people are needed, but only as a reinforcement of that basic base, the geophysical-construction coupling, Dejan Vučković, assistant professor at the Mining Department, told RSE -Geological Faculty in Belgrade.
What did Macedonia learn in 1963?
The deadliest earthquake in the countries of the former Yugoslavia hit Skopje, the capital of Macedonia at the time, on July 26, 1963.
It died 1.070 people, around 4.000 injured, and 100.000 residents were left homeless.
"At that time, 70 percent of the buildings were damaged because the construction was of very poor quality and no consideration was given to seismic protection," seismologist Mihail Garevski told the BBC in Serbian.
He spent his working life in Macedonian institutions dealing with earthquake engineering, i.e. "the science of designing safe buildings".
Among the former countries of the SFR Yugoslavia, today's North Macedonia has the longest and most serious tradition of developing this discipline.
"When the earthquake hit Skopje, help came from all over, and the United Nations decided to set up an earthquake engineering team.
"The first master's studies were held 65 years ago in English and were taught by experts from the world's leading universities," says Garevski.
He worked for 20 years at the Institute for Earthquake Engineering and Engineering Seismology, and now he is the director of the recently established multidisciplinary institution of the Institute for Seismic-Resistant Construction and Climate Change.
"Today, we have the safest construction, because the controls are rigorous.
"Before the start of construction, the project is first checked, and then we go out to the field twice to see if the work is being done in accordance with the project. "It's all because of the tragedy of 1963," he says.
The Macedonian expert explains that after the earthquakes in Zagreb and Petrinja, the Institute for Earthquake Engineering was opened in Croatia.
"The same thing happens in all countries.
"Only after the big earthquake are people employed, equipment is found, but then it's somehow too late," he says.
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How to save yourself from an earthquake?
The earthquake is not forgotten, believes Mihail Garevski, who was 11 years old at the time of the devastating earthquake in Skopje.
The interviewees of the BBC in Serbian agree that the consequences of the earthquake can still be mitigated to some extent.
One way is education.
"Now if we were to go down the street and ask people what to do and what not to do in case of an earthquake, I'm not sure how many of them would know the answer.
"30, 40 years ago, there were exercises, so generations and generations were taught that one should not rush outside, jump through the window, but rather find shelter and wait for it to pass," she states.
Tomislav Fiket adds that a lot could be learned from Japan, where children from the earliest age have exercises on how to behave in the event of an earthquake.
In addition to this, Mihail Gareski adds that modern technologies can also be used.
He explains that there are applications for notification and early warning of earthquakes.
So the app Lastquake, developed by the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center, provides earthquake notification in the immediate vicinity and around the world.
There are also early warning apps that, depending on how close an earthquake is, send a pre-quake notification via beeps on your phone.
If you are close, then the warning is three, four seconds earlier, but if you are, for example, 100 kilometers away, the warning arrives 15 seconds earlier, so you have time to find cover, explains Garevski.
"We had a case where people in Mexico City were warned almost two minutes in advance of an earthquake whose epicenter was 800 kilometers away, even though earthquakes in Mexico are nowhere near as destructive," he explains.
All services need additional hiring of experts.
During the penultimate week of October, news arrived that the Republic Seismology Institute in Serbia should hire two more.
The acting director of the institute, Dejan Valčić, says that it is about "two experienced colleagues who graduated from the Faculty of Mining and Geology".
He adds that the Institute will also try to attract young experts in the coming period, among other things, by creating opportunities for professional, international training.
Jadranka Mihaljević believes that opportunities to participate in international projects, as well as scholarships for young students, are a way to create a base of experts.
"We don't need 100 seismologists, we need three assets that we will support," he adds.
It is especially important, experts point out, that it must be built in accordance with the regulations that clearly determine how to prevent buildings from collapsing during earthquakes.
"We have to take care of it for everyone's safety," says Tomislav Fiket.
To Marijana Gašović, the way in which the solitaire was built, where she lives today with her husband and three children, means the most.
Although she is on the 12th floor, she says she is less afraid than when she was in a lower building.
"As far as I've heard, Japanese experts participated in the construction of our solitaire after the earthquake in Skopje, so it was made to mitigate the earthquake," she says.
Since he is on the 12th floor, he feels every tremor in the neighborhood.
“I'm scared, of course, but what can you do? If it's going to happen, it will happen," he says.
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