The surviving buildings in Turkey provide design guidelines for future earthquake construction

The left one shows a building without seismic isolation, while the right one shows a building with a seismic isolation system, which reduces the amount of damage to the building during an earthquake. The red lines indicate the amount of movement the building could experience during an earthquake.

Both seismic isolation systems and seismic dampers can help a building achieve “functional recovery” – a performance objective under which buildings are constructed to prevent damage and enable re-occupancy. Designing such buildings will not only save people and buildings, but also protect societies and economies from collapse and earthquakes.

While functional recovery is an emerging idea for building earthquake-resistant structures, global modern building codes state that structures must, at a minimum, have measures in place to prevent the building from collapsing—called a life safety goal. Buildings that follow a life safety goal are designed to withstand damage in a controlled manner, to keep the building standing and to protect those within.

While these buildings most likely will not collapse, they may not be safe to use after an earthquake. While this is not the same as a functional recovery, if more buildings were built to reach the safety threshold of life in Turkey and Syria, thousands of lives could have been saved.

case in Türkiye

Much of the damage in Turkey occurred in non-compressible concrete buildings constructed under the Turkish Building Code before 1998. Ductile concrete building elements, required by the new building codes, are more flexible, thanks to steel reinforcing bars in critical locations. They can absorb building movements caused by earthquakes. Older, incompressible buildings also tend to have poorly arranged steel reinforcements, making them vulnerable to sudden collapse of building columns.

Likewise, many so-called soft-storey buildings were damaged during these earthquakes. A soft story is a level that is significantly more susceptible to lateral seismic forces than other floors in a multi-storey building. The first floor of these buildings—commonly used for commercial purposes such as retail, garage, or offices—tends to have more open space and fewer structural components, such as beams and columns, making them vulnerable to collapse.

These types of buildings are found all over the world, including in densely populated, earthquake-prone areas like Istanbul, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Vancouver—all located near active fault lines.

Buildings designed according to ancient laws can be reinforced to meet the life safety performance threshold. However, these upgrades can cost a lot of money, and implementing these upgrades, especially for private buildings, requires well-planned policies.

Learning lessons

While buildings designed with the goal of safety of life can save thousands of lives, the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand revealed the limitations of modern seismic codes that focus solely on this design goal. Damage to buildings designed with the safety of life goal was so extensive that thousands were demolished after the earthquake.

It was this earthquake that prompted the engineers to focus on “functional restoration” and the implementation of earthquake protection technologies on a larger scale. The incremental cost of these earthquake protection technologies is usually less than 5% of the initial construction costs and pales in comparison to the cost of the social and economic disruptions caused by a major earthquake. In addition, securing lower premiums may offset most of these initial costs.

Total economic losses after the Christchurch earthquake were estimated at $32 billion, not accounting for inflation, of which $24 billion was construction costs. The recent earthquakes in Turkey are estimated to have cost more than $84 billion and are still ongoing.

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