Turkey rushes to rebuild an area larger than Portugal after the earthquake | international

A month and a half after the earthquake that struck southeastern Turkey and northwest Syria killed nearly 60,000 people, bulldozers are still clearing rubble and demolishing buildings. The task is daunting: It adds up to 200 million tons of concrete, brick, metal and wood, according to UNDP calculations. In terms of volume, this debris, piled one meter high, would occupy 100 square kilometers (38.6 square miles), which is similar in size to the city of Barcelona and much larger than Manhattan.

About 3.3 million people have been displaced by the earthquake in Turkey alone. Many went to the western provinces, staying with relatives, or in hotels that opened their doors to them, or in university dorms. But nearly two million people, according to Turkish government data, live in camps for victims in the quake-hit region, where last week’s storms caused floods and 20 deaths.

More than 500,000 homes have been destroyed by the earthquake or must be demolished due to serious structural damage. Another 130,000 sustained moderate damage and cannot be inhabited until extensive repair work is completed. Likewise, tens of thousands of public buildings – from schools and hospitals to government offices – suffered significant damage, as did private property ranging from stables and farms to factories. But there is also damage to key infrastructure such as roads, airports, ports, railways, power lines and reservoirs. More than 620 miles of pipes carrying drinking water and nearly 1,200 miles of sewers were damaged, as well as several sewage and sewage treatment plants.

“The scale of the destruction is huge. On the road from Nordag to Antakya [along the fault line in southeastern Anatolia] The only thing that changes about buildings is if they are badly damaged or if they are razed to the ground. The affected area is 110,000 square kilometers – larger than Austria or Portugal, and comparable to Bulgaria – which creates a very big problem. “It’s not like in other places we’ve been, where you can focus on reconstruction work,” explains Humberto Lopez, World Bank Turkey director, who was in the area recently to analyze the situation. The first damage assessment by the World Bank has put the direct impact of the earthquake at $34 billion, to which a similar amount must be added for reconstruction. Then there are the losses associated with the interruption of economic activity in the region, which the Foundation estimates at about $4 billion.

These estimates are lower than those provided by the United Nations Development Program (more than $100 billion) and the Turkish government, which estimated the earthquake’s cost at $103.6 billion or about 10% of the country’s GDP. The Turkish opposition, which is pinning its hopes on the upcoming May elections, believes the figure will be even higher, similar to $126 billion. López explains why there is such a discrepancy in numbers: “In these calculations we have to distinguish between the damage to damaged infrastructure, which is what we calculated, and the cost of undoing the effects of that damage, which is difficult to calculate because it depends on how the reconstruction is carried out,” she points out. Our data indicates that we describe the damage to privately owned residential buildings. We still do not know how this reconstruction will be carried out, whether it will be through public initiatives, subsidies, etc. “

Despite this, a European source involved in earthquake damage analysis says the impact is much greater: “The assessment has not been completed in many aspects. A more detailed analysis is needed of the impact not only on buildings, but also on people. And the cost of reconstruction will be Even higher, because it cannot be rebuilt in the same way as it was before.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government promised to build half a million homes within a year. Part of these will be built by the public agency TOKI and part by semi-open tenders for which private companies will bid. And there are areas of towns that will have to be moved because, as previous earthquakes have shown, the ground in which the new powerful earthquakes were located will not resist, no matter how well built. “During the earthquake, the ground behaved as if it were liquid and the buildings lost all support, so our technicians made it clear that in these areas, it would not be possible to rebuild,” Lopez says.

In some areas, foundation digging of new urban areas has already begun after Erdogan issued a decree, something the Federation of Turkish Architects and Engineers Chambers considers premature, as it is being implemented without a new zoning plan. In addition, Eyup Muhcu, President of the Turkish Chamber of Architects, explained that it is not safe after starting construction, because the continuous aftershocks in the area can damage the foundations during cementation. It is being built in a hurry out of pure electoral concerns, just to be able to say before [May] Elections: “We’ve already built these many buildings, and we’ll be done in a year,” says Mohko. Instead, decent living conditions must be ensured in temporary settlements because earthquake victims are likely to spend two or three years there. But there is no interest in that. There are few container and prefab houses. Most people live in tents, in poor conditions, and there may be problems like what we had with the recent floods.”

On Monday, at an international donors’ conference in Brussels, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey would build “faster, better and greener”, but experts stress the need to focus on quality rather than speed, given that Turkey is sitting on a turf. intense seismic activity.

In Brussels, donors pledged nearly 6 billion euros ($6.5 billion) in aid and soft loans for Turkey’s reconstruction, a much smaller amount than needed, although it could be increased in the future. I am sure that, in the coming years, the international community will provide more funds according to the needs. “The bottleneck will not be money, but reconstruction projects,” says the European source familiar with the matter, pointing out that the housing needs are five or six times more than the annual construction capacity of the sector in Turkey. Each donor country or institution will choose how to distribute the funds; In the case of European donors, they will go to specific projects, which will be monitored technically and financially: “It is important for donors that projects meet a series of requirements. We also have to justify every penny of European taxpayers’ money.”

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