At the time, experts warned of an optimum period in which a population’s nerves would be sufficiently hot wired to take the sometimes purely practical measures to protect against the effects of a natural disaster. After four years, that all too human sense of invulnerability seems to kick in. How many of those living in earthquake zones still keep a pair of slippers in the bedroom with soles that can withstand shards of glass or a few bottles of fresh water in a car boot or somewhere safe? If your bookcases aren’t securely fastened to the wall and your precious Ming vase not wired to its pedestal, stop reading this and see to it now.Every now and then societies receive a wake up call to something more serious about earthquake mitigation, and unfortunately this comes in the form of other people’s misfortunes. It is may be hard to relate to the decimation of the population of Port-au-Prince from the Turkish part of the world, which has long been aware of the need to build to earthquake standard. Desperately poor Haiti was a deck of cards waiting for the first strong wind. More chastening is the destruction in Chile, which once prided itself in a high degree of preparedness. However, it is impossible not to take note of the devastation in Turkey’s own backyard. The deaths last Monday of some 51 people in the Eastern province of Elazığ occurred in an under-populated part of the country after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake. Much larger events in Japan have resulted in no or only minimal loss of life.
Awareness is, of course, part of the problem. Experts speak of a phenomenon called “temporary seismic quiescence,” which roughly translates as “even if populations forget they live in an earthquake zone, the land beneath their feet does not.” Mechanical measurement of earthquakes is a relatively recent phenomenon. Charles Richter of the eponymous scale only began publishing in the 1930s. Just because there have been no events within living memory or even in the last 200 years does not mean that earthquakes never happened. Turkey has the dubious good fortune of having been a land where records exist for millennia, and we know from the Ottoman archives, Byzantine chronicles and the histories of antiquity that Anatolia has been a land of constant activity.
Public administrators have no excuse, therefore, to be forgetful. This is all the more the case because there have been major quakes this century along one of Turkey’s two major faults lines. The North Anatolian Fault extends from Kemah, a small town west of Erzincan, all the way to the Sea of Marmara. Erzincan itself suffered a 7.9 temblor in 1939 with over 32,000 casualties, and there have been a dozen other incidents since. The last was in Düzce in 1999, a 7.2 earthquake that seems almost benign in comparison to the effect of the İzmit quake a few months earlier. Even then, the number of fatalities was comparable to those who perished in Chile. In 1998, Turkey was reminded by an earthquake in Adana-Ceyhan of another more quiescent East Anatolian Fault line that extends from the Gulf of İskenderun to meet the North Anatolian Fault in eastern Turkey. It was a 6.2 event that caused 145 deaths. It is not alarmist to say more serious events can happen.
Awareness is just the first step in preparedness. If one assumes that large swathes of Turkey are in a seismic zone, then construction, particularly low-cost homes, must take this into consideration. What happened in the villages of Elazığ occurred on a massive scale in the city of Bam in southeastern Iran. Most of the buildings were adobe -- cheap, cool in summer and warm in winter. But when a 6.6 earthquake came, the death toll was over 26,000. According to reports in the Radikal newspaper, it was not that people were unaware of the dangers of adobe houses but simply did not have the means to build safer structures. These were herders who were forbidden to graze their livestock in traditional pastures as part of a policy of depopulating the countryside to prevent Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants from finding succor. Instead of being compensated, they paid with their families’ lives.
It’s not earthquakes which kill people but substandard buildings which kill people, architects warn. Alas the list does not end there.
