Turkey earthquake: Nearly 200 builders arrested over alleged poor construction

Istanbul, Turkey CNN –

Turkey’s Justice Ministry said about 200 people have been arrested over allegations of poor building construction following the catastrophic earthquake that struck Turkey earlier this month.

Nearly 50,000 people were killed across Turkey and Syria after the Feb. 6 quake.

The ministry said 626 people were “suspected” after buildings completely collapsed or were severely damaged in the aftermath of the quakes. Some suspects were killed in the quake while the police are still searching for others.

Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said Saturday that evidence had been collected from thousands of buildings.

More than 5,700 buildings have collapsed in Turkey, according to the country’s disaster management agency, and questions have been raised about the safety of structures in some of the affected areas.

“The thing that hits most often is the type of collapses — what we call a pancake collapse — the kind of collapse that engineers don’t like to see,” said Mustafa Erdık, a professor of earthquake engineering at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. . “In landslides like this, it is difficult – as you can see – and very tragic to save lives. It makes the work of search and rescue teams very difficult.”

Erdke told CNN that the images of widespread destruction and wreckage indicate “that there are very different qualities in the designs and construction.” The type of structural failures that follow an earthquake, he says, are usually partial collapses. “Total collapses are something you always try to avoid in both the symbols and the actual design,” he added.

After previous disasters, building codes were tightened – which should have ensured that modern buildings would withstand large tremors. However, many of the damaged buildings throughout the affected area appear to have been newly constructed. Residents and experts are now wondering whether the government has failed to take the necessary steps to enforce the building regulations.

Yasemin Didim Aktas, a structural engineer and lecturer at University College London, told CNN that while the earthquake and its aftershocks constitute “a very powerful event that would defy even code-compliant buildings,” the scale of the damage indicated that the buildings did not meet safety standards.

“What we see here definitely tells us that there is something wrong with those buildings, and it could be that they were not designed in line with the code in the first place, or that the implementation was not designed properly,” said Didim Aktas. .

Many critics are also skeptical of the Turkish government’s periodic approval of so-called “construction amnesties”—essentially legal exemptions that, for a fee, forgive developers for building projects without the necessary safety requirements.

The amnesties are designed to legalize old, substandard buildings that were constructed without the proper permits. Nor did it require developers to update their properties to code.

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