Manmade disaster

For the past two days, every Turkish public official or municipal worker to open their mouths has spoken about the heavy volume of rain that fell and of the “inevitability” of the “natural” disaster. I share the opinion of many city planners and experts on the subject who disagree with these evaluations. More than a natural disaster, this event in the heart of İstanbul seems to me a full-fledged manmade disaster.

Imagine you've woken up early one morning and hit the road in your car to catch a flight. As you travel along the highway, the only thing out of place that you note is that it's raining particularly hard. But in an instant, the road you're driving on turns into an angry river, and the fierce waters of this river block the road in front of you and then sweep away your vehicle; you are stuck inside the car and (God forbid) you drown there. While you'd intended to catch your flight, perhaps on your way to meet a loved one or attend a business meeting, and you violated no rules, something like this happening to you could probably only happen in a nightmare after you fall asleep following a heavy meal. If you think this is the case, you're wrong; what I've described is exactly what happened on Wednesday morning to someone a friend of mine knows. The person who called his son (my friend's friend) and spoke their last words, saying, “My car is entirely full of water,” is no longer alive.

How could this citizen have known that the highway that they took every day that connects İstanbul's two main highways, the busiest junction in the city and the most important road leading to Turkey's biggest airport (the Basın Express Yolu, Press Express Road), was constructed upon a riverbank?

How could he have guessed that the highway that he set out upon stopped being a road with even the lightest rain, turning into a rushing river? And on top of this, despite meteorological warnings issued beginning on Sunday, neither the police nor the municipality, neither the highways directorate nor any public administration took a single precaution regarding the dangers that awaited all who would use that road. So, from where would it have occurred to a citizen going about their business as usual of catching a flight or going to work that they would face the rushing waters of a flash flood that day?

And it must also be asked why, in Turkey, the municipality, the police department, the highways directorate or the government never thinks to take precautions to avoid disaster, but always mobilizes rescue efforts and damage control after the fact. In cities in the United States and in Europe, when the slightest risk of danger presents itself the police, firefighters, ambulances and dozens of other public officials rise to the challenge. So why is it that we don't witness the same precautions being taken? Is it that the lives of Turkish citizens are worth much less than their Western counterparts? Perhaps the people who most fall victim to dangers that could be addressed in advance by such life-saving precautions are the Turkish people. Because when it comes to the issues that affect their lives and pose potential danger to them, they never encounter any intervention on the part of the police or any other officials. And as if this wasn't enough, following every tragedy that takes place, the people hear vows and advice from the public officials who should instead be accepting responsibility for their mistakes and apologizing to society.

Now, let's think… Do you think that had there been a police barricade at the junction that turns onto the highway in question and had those motorists and passengers who lost their lives or had a narrow brush with death been warned and told not to use that route, so many people still would have died?

At the very least, wouldn't our friend's dearly beloved father still have been alive today? If building permits hadn't been granted for land along riverbanks and gullies, if the usage of unsuitable vehicles for employee transportation had been disallowed, and, what's more, if a kilometers-long highway hadn't been constructed along the longitude of a flood path, then today we would have only been discussing how heavy rains had saved İstanbul from suffering from the level of drought next summer that it had faced last summer, we would have been talking about the great blessings brought along with the rain.

It's necessary to ask now: While there's no disaster at hand like an earthquake, tsunami or similar event, is the rain responsible for the deaths of over 30 people or the public officials who failed to take the necessary precautions and allowed infrastructural insufficiencies? Where should the blame be placed, especially when the public officials failed to learn a lesson from a similar disaster in the same area 14 years ago?