Nine years have passed since the fire in the Colectiv club, which killed 65 people. 28 of them died in hospitals in the weeks following the tragedy. The authorities then promised to build three centers for the severely burned. None of these are completed, and Romania sends its patients with severe burns abroad.
The construction of the three major burn centers has been blocked for a long time, starting only in 2023. These are three centers that will have 26 intensive care beds for major burns and 26 intermediate therapy beds. They will be in Timișoara, where the most advanced construction is located, in Târgu Mureș and Bucharest. All three centers are being built with money from the World Bank.
At the moment, in Romania there are 24 beds for the elderly and 10 for children at Grigore Alexandrescu. The 24 are in Bucharest, in Floreasca, Burns Hospital and Bagdasar Hospital. There are also beds in Iași and at the County Hospital in Timișoara.
If these centers are completed at the beginning of next year, as the announced deadlines are, Romania will have 50 beds for the severely burned, and we are talking about adults.
The Colectiv tragedy on the night of October 30, 2015
64 young people died in the fire on the evening of October 30, 2015 – 27 of them that night, and the rest in hospitals in the weeks that followed. 150 people were injured, most of them maimed for life.
In the summer of 2017, almost 2 years after the fire, one of the survivors committed suicide. In 2022, almost 7 years after the tragedy, the Bucharest Court of Appeal pronounced the final sentence in the Colectiv file 1, a file in which the causes of the fire were investigated and the culprits convicted.
Among those convicted at that time were Cristian Popescu Piedone, former mayor of sector 4, and the owners of the Colectiv club. Piedone was acquitted in 2023 after serving a year and a month in prison.
The Collectiv File 2, which concerned the conditions in which state officials acted after the fire in October 2015, was closed by the prosecutors in August 2024.
Both Nicolae Bănicioiu, former Minister of Health, and the hospital managers who did not transfer the injured to abroad have escaped criminal conviction, because, according to the prosecutors, there is no legal text that would have obliged the authorities to transfer the burned victims abroad.
The struggles of those who survived and of the relatives of the dead
After the fire, Mihai Grecea was in a coma for almost a month and hospitalized for almost two and a half months. He suffered severe lung burns and his survival was almost a miracle – doctors at one point gave him only a 12% chance of recovery. In the following years, Mihai Grecea constantly fought so that other major burn victims could survive in a country that does not have the conditions to save them: first from civil society, as an activist for the rights of burn patients, and in 2021, time for 8 months, as an advisor in the Ministry of Health.
On the night of October 30, 2015, Adina Apostol, survivor of the Colectiv fire, was admitted to the Elias Hospital in the capital with burns on 50% of her body surface and minimal chances of survival. On the first day she was stable, doctors from the “Queen Astrid” Military Hospital in Belgium, present at Elias to take over the wounded, selected her for transfer as well. Adina says that was her chance at life. He was then 26 years old. Adina was in a coma for a month, and then she was hospitalized in Belgium for another three months. After discharge, he remained in Belgium for three years for treatments and operations.
The good news for Adina is that she managed to outcome the trauma somehow, met a guy, got married and she even became a mom.
Eugen Iancu lost his 22-year-old son – Alexandru – after the fire 9 years ago. Alexandru Iancu died 3 weeks after the fire, at St. John’s Hospital in Bucharest, with 5 nosocomial infections in his body, according to his father. He was the 59th victim. After the death of his son, Eugen Iancu founded the GTG 3010 Collective Association, which aimed to monitor the investigations that followed the tragedy and support the survivors. He also wanted to build a center for treating burns from donations, when he saw that the authorities were not doing it.
“We are in a country where, after 9 years, we don’t even have a ward for major burns! A ward built in a hospital. I’m not talking about a center of great burns! How is it possible that in 9 years you don’t do anything?”, asks Eugen Iancu, quoted by Hotnews.ro.
Eugen Iancu tried, through the association he founded in memory of his son and the other victims, including to initiate a fund-raising for the construction of a center for major burns. “But everyone ran away. And I was told: <No one will help you! It would be a slap in the face in this country, where nothing has been built for 30 years.> We were told that no doctor, no politician would help us.” Eugen Iancu believes that the doctors, not the politicians, are the ones who opposed the most: “This is the biggest problem. We suffer from a pride in it: lest!”
Relatives and Survivors Called to Court by ISU
In 2022, nearly seven years after the tragedy, the Bucharest Court of Appeal issued a final ruling in the Colectiv 1 case concerning the causes of the fire and those responsible. Among those sentenced at that time were Cristian Popescu Piedone, the former mayor of Sector 4, and the owners of the Colectiv club. Piedone was acquitted in 2023 after serving one year and one month in prison. Today, his son is the mayor of Sector 5.
In this case, the survivors of the fire and the relatives of the deceased received a total of 60 million euros in compensation—funds paid from the Government Reserve Fund.
However, this year, they began to receive notifications stating that the Inspectorate for Emergency Situations (ISU) had opened a case against them, says Eugen Iancu: “In 2022, when the sentences were given in the Colectiv 1 case, compensation was awarded. Those compensations were enforced by our lawyers, who appointed some bailiffs. Those bailiffs took a commission. Then we found out that our lawyers also collected money from us but received funds from ISU as well. The bailiffs charged their legal fees, but the maximum percentages. ISU went to court, and probably the easiest way was that if a bailiff collected, say, 5,000 euros, it would be reduced to 500 euros. The bailiff has to return the remaining money. However, because ISU filed a complaint against the civil parties—this is how the system works in Romania—the victims from Colectiv and the parents of the victims are paying some money that actually belongs to others because they were very greedy.”
Eugen Iancu says he is expected in court on Thursday, October 31. “But I expect to be executed by them. I will not pay them. I wait for ISU, convicted for the killing of 65 young people, to execute me for some money with which I have no connection. They have asked me for around 7,000 lei, plus interest calculated from 2022 onward. The Romanian state has not told me why my child died after three weeks in the hospital because the case was closed. Instead, they will execute me for an amount with which I have no connection. We received the compensations, but the morality of this action seems condemnable to me. They had all the levers to take action against the bailiffs, not against us. They behaved as the Romanian state does in its relationship with citizens.”
Eugen Iancu also states that all 300 people—survivors and relatives of the victims—who were part of the Colectiv 1 case are in the same situation: “The bailiffs collected a lot of money after doing nothing more than sending a piece of paper.”