In the early hours of 22 March 2020, the day the coronavirus quarantine started, Zagreb was struck by a ML 5.5 earthquake. Despite its relatively low magnitude, the shallow focus of the earthquake and the poor state of Zagreb building stock contributed to widespread damage, even affecting some new buildings such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and Centar Cvjetni. Most of the hospitals, located in old buildings in the vulnerable northern part of the city, suffered damage and had to be evacuated. The damage was later estimated at €11.6 billion. In the early days of recovery, Bandić appointed himself head of civil protection in Zagreb and began holding daily press conferences on the subjects of earthquake and COVID-19. Bandić received criticism for his remark that the damages occurred because "the residents did not invest in their property" the announcement that property owners would be left to finance their own repairs, and assigning the blame for city centre damages to homeowners who did not take the city up on a façade renovation program, which in fact did not include seismic retrofitting or any other earthquake damage prevention work. A state inquiry found that none of the contracts aforementioned renovation projects had been closed, and that the emergency disaster fund had been spent on various associations, religious community projects and festivities. In April, protests against soon continued in the form of cacerolazo, while Bandić was accused by the Ministry of Construction of obstructing the recovery efforts, including refusing to house residents made homeless by the earthquake in empty and squatted social housing.