Scandal of unpreparedness

The 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck near Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey and neighboring Syria on February 6, and the large aftershocks that followed destroyed thousands of buildings and claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Responding to criticism of efforts to rescue buried survivors, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly said it was “impossible to prepare for the scale of the disaster”. But is he right?

I don’t think so, and I’ll explain why.

Seven days of aftershocks. The epicenter of the original M7.8 earthquake on February 6 was marked in blue. Yellow dots show foci in the following 6 days. Symbols show smaller foci down to M4.5.

It is true that it is difficult to predict when and where an earthquake might occur. Days before, there are sometimes warning signs of a major earthquake such as inexplicable nocturnal glows in the sky or unusual animal behavior. But these signals are unreliable and not well understood.

In Japan and California, there are warning systems that can give a warning of a few tens of seconds, set traffic lights to red and stop trains – but apparently not long enough for an evacuation of any kind.

The Turkish government is well aware that the country is located in active fault zones in the Earth’s crust, and has a long record of seismic activity. However, builders were allowed to flout earthquake-proof building regulations.

And seismologists are adept at producing earthquake hazard maps, such as one of the Turkish government’s maps shown here:

Official map of seismic hazards for Turkey, 2015. Prime Ministry Presidency of Disaster and Emergency Management, AFAD Earthquake Preparedness

Even if we assume there is a reliable system that would give, say, one day or one month advance warning of a major earthquake, how should it be used?

If it were up to you, would you try to move millions of people out of the potentially affected area? Will they be ready to go? Where will they live and work next if they return to find their homes destroyed?

The best way to prepare for an earthquake disaster, and what Erdogan could have done, is to build houses and infrastructure using earthquake-resistant technologies. This way, people are not killed during an earthquake and still have homes afterwards.

There are many ways in which buildings can be designed and built to withstand earthquakes, so that they do not collapse. In an area at risk of large earthquakes, a multi-storey building should be designed so that when the ground begins to shake, its outer walls on both sides sway in unison in the same direction as each other.

Conversely, if opposite walls are free to sway away from each other, the overlapping floors become temporarily unsupported, allowing the upper floors to sway into the lower floors. This happened to deadly effect in Turkey.

Builders can prevent this by structurally tying floors and walls together, without making the building’s structure so rigid that it breaks, instead of bending slightly. This could mean more steel and less concrete.

Other measures are possible at a greater cost. For example, foundations can be made deeper, connected to bedrock (because this vibrates less than soil), or they can be installed on flexible platforms to insulate the building from earth movement.

It broadcast news footage the day after the earthquake, including collapsed buildings.

It is a tragedy and a scandal that the Turkish government knows all this. They have introduced a series of progressively stricter seismic building codes, claiming to have learned lessons from the 1999 earthquake near the city of Izmit, near Istanbul, which killed 17,000 people.

But journalists report how these building codes have been widely violated in Turkey. Building in earthquake resistance adds perhaps 20% to construction project costs, so the temptation to ignore the regulations is obvious. In this case, the government not only failed to enforce its own building codes, but also encouraged non-compliance by allowing builders to pay “construction chastity” for officially recognized infractions of the codes.

Charities are now trying to raise hundreds of millions of pounds to help with the emergency response alone.

The Turkish government bet on the lives of its people and lost. The proceeds of the “construction amnesty” are far too little to pay for the reconstruction now required, though I would venture to say that the construction industry would do well from overtime.

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