Istanbul -

The collapse of thousands of buildings in Turkey following the earthquake that struck the south of the country at dawn on the sixth of February, with a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale, which killed more than 34,000 people in an unfinished statistic, which led to the situation of some actors in the construction sector. And construction in the dock

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after experts suggested that the widespread damage caused by the earthquake resulted largely from the contractors' failure to adhere to building regulations that include technical standards that guarantee the buildings' steadfastness to a large extent in the face of earthquakes.

And while the pioneers of the communication sites praised the contractor, Aidan Durson, who built more than a thousand apartments in the state of Hatay, distributed over more than 50 residential complexes, between 1987 and 2002 and was not demolished in the aftermath of the earthquake, the authorities arrested dozens of contractors and owners of the destroyed residential complexes.

Experts say Turkey has enough regulations to avoid a catastrophe like this one, but they are being laxly enforced by some construction companies and contractors.

Construction specifications

Speaking to Al-Jazeera Net, the civil engineer Saad Al-Nahlawi, who works for a real estate development company in Turkey, revealed what technical standards contractors should adhere to to ensure the safety and steadfastness of the building, whether in the face of earthquakes or otherwise.

Al-Nahlawi said that there are many "codes" (specifications) concerned with the structural design of various types of buildings and facilities, and these codes include special technical standards, which may differ according to the geographical location of the region and its proximity to seismic faults, soil condition and groundwater level.

He pointed out that Turkey has a so-called "building code" that is updated every several years, and the last update of the seismic design code was in 2018. The code usually covers several factors, some of which are related to earthquakes, and some of which are related to moisture, aging in relation to reinforced concrete, and strength resistance in columns.


The expert pointed out that these standards go into many details, for example, they set a minimum for the area between the columns, their length and width, the percentage of reinforcement in them, the soil treatment and the percentage of their depth, and they also determine the percentage of cement and gravel within the used mixture.

He added, "When we study the building's resistance to earthquakes, we take into account that there are differences between earthquakes, some of which are horizontal and vertical, in addition to the concussive earthquake and the rotational earthquake, and we formulate a combination of these types, and apply simulation to the construction unit to ensure that it is able to face all types of earthquakes ".

Meeting standards ensures no collapse

Regarding the effect of meeting the special technical standards on the building’s resistance to earthquakes, Al-Nahlawi stressed that the building that meets the standards usually withstands disasters, despite the possibility of being affected, as walls can crack, glass may break, and bricks may also fall, but columns and foundations should not be affected except in earthquakes. very strobe.

As an example, al-Nahlawi says, "We noticed that all the buildings constructed by the state-run Toki Construction Company, which includes more than 150,000 apartments in the earthquake-hit areas, did not collapse, because they comply with the required building regulations."

According to the civil engineer, we can say that modern buildings may have collapsed for one of two reasons:

  • Either the contractor did not comply with the construction officer

  • Or because he built the building on soft soil and did not reinforce it

He pointed out that one of the buildings was fully funded without anything collapsing, which means that the contractor did not address the soil problem.

For his part, Zaini Tekin, the advisor at Istanbul Technical University, believes that the causes of the collapse are usually due to the poor quality of cement, which is mixed with a lot of water and gravel and very small amounts of cement.

According to the expert, other possible reasons are due to the quality of the iron bars, which may be too thin to be able to support the columns, which limits the strength of the building.


The opposition criticizes and the government responds

The Turkish opposition blamed the government, which relied on the development of the real estate sector over the past two decades to be the locomotive of economic growth.

The head of the opposition Republican People's Party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, said that the decisions to approve buildings that do not meet safety standards, the latest of which took place in June 2018 before the general elections, especially in the states of Kahramanmaraş and Hatay, were the reason for turning "the houses in which people live into cemeteries." .

However, the government - in turn - rejected these accusations, and the Minister of Urbanization, Environment and Climate Change, Murad Qorum, said that most of the collapsed buildings were built between 1999 and 2000.

After the arrest of a number of contractors responsible for buildings that collapsed following the earthquake, the Turkish Ministry of Justice ordered public prosecutors in the ten states to open investigations into earthquake-related crimes, and to prosecute those responsible for constructing non-standard buildings that caused their collapse.

The most prominent of the arrested contractors was Mehmet Yaşar Coşkun, the contractor of the housing complex called "Rönesans Rezidans" that was destroyed in the earthquake in Hatay, and whose campaign to sell apartments had the slogan "A corner of heaven".

The owner, Hüseyin Yalçın Coşkun, was also arrested while he was fleeing to the Karadag region of Azerbaijan.

Government buildings collapse

The city of Hatay, one of the worst-hit regions, saw massive damage to government buildings, hospitals, and even the local branch of Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD).

Official figures show that the number of companies operating in the real estate sector has increased by 43% over the past ten years, to reach 127,000 companies by 2020.

Starting from the third quarter of 2021, the real estate construction sector contracted, and the contraction reached its peak in the second quarter of 2022, by 10.1%, according to the Building Supplies Manufacturers Association (EMSAD).

Construction investments constitute 50% of fixed capital investments in Turkey, while its direct share in the gross national product is 6%, and this percentage rises to 30% if you take into account the sectors that the construction sector affects indirectly.