The Current Worrying Situation of Technical Expertise and Rehabilitation of Existing Buildings in Romania

Romania has an important older or newer built heritage composed from reinforced concrete structures and reinforced and unreinforced masonry buildings. A large part of existing buildings in Romania, either buildings in the community’s service (as schools, kindergartens, hospitals, museums, churches town/city halls, etc.) or residential buildings, has been designed under regulations in use at their conceiving time. Those buildings do not fulfill requirements of actual codes and some of them are in an advanced state of degradation, often representing a real public hazard. Currently, there is no official realistic and credible statistics on technical condition of buildings in Romania. The only existing documents are referring to a limited number of technically expertized buildings that had been surveyed during the years. Those buildings had been classified in risk and emergency classes. The evaluations of the expertized buildings are, in many cases, already deprecated and exceeded due to the existence of new norms and regulations. On the other hand, a large part of those buildings is close to the end of the normal service life for which they had been designed. The article tries to present the current worrying situation of the technical expertise and the rehabilitation of the existing constructions in Romania.