PREVENTABLE DEVASTATION

In Turkey, a pair of lethal earthquakes indicts a government

- SIMMONE SHAH

IN TURKEY—LOCATED BETWEEN SEVERAL PLATE boundaries and directly on two main fault zones— earthquakes are a fact of life.

But the two that hit the country’s southern reaches on Feb. 6 brought a level of destruction that numbers can only suggest—a 7.8- magnitude quake, followed nine hours later by a temblor registering 7.5. The death toll nine days later stood at 41,000, including thousands killed across the nearby border in northern Syria.

“These are the kinds of quakes we’d expect to see 10 or 20 years apart,” says Cuneyt Tuzun, an earthquake engineer based in Izmir, Turkey. “They happened within a few hours of each other.”

They also happened in a country that, despite every warning, had not prepared. Ten years after a 1999 earthquake in the northern city of Izmit killed over 17,000 people, the Turkish government answered the outrage over shoddy construction, pledging new building standards and a plan to strengthen existing structures, and designating hundreds of open urban spaces as evacuation safe zones. The measures were crucial, in a rapidly urbanizing nation where millions reside in the multi-story concrete apartment buildings that carpet Turkish cities.