«Travel Health Turkey quake sounds alarm bells for IstanbulNews about: Turkey by Michel Sailhan
ISTANBUL, March 10, 2010 (AFP) - A killer earthquake in eastern Turkey this week has revived fears over the threat facing Istanbul, a sprawling megapolis plagued by sub-standard building that experts say will be decimated by a tremor in the near future. Monday's 6.0-magnitude quake in remote mountain villages in Elazig province levelled scores of mud-brick houses and killed 51 people, highlighting how shoddy construction exacerbated the damage from the disaster. "Once again, we find ourselves face-to-face with an earthquake. Once again, we find Turkey woefully unprepared," said an editorial in the English-language Hurriyet Daily News.
The government immediately ordered the public construction company to start work on building sound homes for the survivors as experts lamented that a quake with a magnitude of 6.0 should not cause even material damage. "Who... recalls the 6.5-magnitude earthquake that struck the northern California city of Eureka on January 10? Few we are sure, for there were no deaths and only minor injuries," Hurriyet Daily News said.
Taking Monday's tremor as a reminder for Istanbul, Turkish newspapers listed 11 quakes which have jolted the country since the 1930s, including two powerful tremors in 1999 that devastated the northwest, including parts of Istanbul. Some 20,000 people were killed in the tremors that struck three months apart as the eastern strand of the North Anatolia faultline, which lies less than than 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Istanbul, ruptured. "In Istanbul, everybody says that the risks are enormous but we keep on constructing poor quality buildings," Sinan Ozeren, a geophysicist from Istanbul Technical University, told AFP.
A recent study by the Turkish Chamber of Civil Engineers (IMO) predicted that a powerful earthquake in Istanbul would kill up to 150,000 people, injure up to 200,000, leave some 400,000 homeless and damage 300,000 buildings. The report, published last week, warned that over half of construction projects approved by engineers were not earthquake-proof and that 86 percent of the city's hospitals could collapse.
Cemal Gokce, the head of the IMO Istanbul office, stressed the need to tighten inspection rules, explaining that anyone with an engineering diploma, regardless of their area of expertise, could currently approve buildings as earthquake-proof. "Too often inspections are carried out generically without an in-depth analysis... of the characteristics, complexity and size of the building. Therefore, buildings are marked as earthquake-proof when in fact they are not," Gokce said.
Ozeren underlined that chronic and widespread corruption remained a major problem in ensuring quality construction. "Seismic standards are well known. They are the same everywhere, in Turkey and elsewhere. But they are not applied because of corruption at different levels, from builders to municipalities. This is true for poor areas as well as rich," he said.
Turkish and foreign seismologists all agree that Istanbul, home to some 15 million, lives under the threat of one or more earthquakes that will strike in the coming decades. French geophysicists Louis Geli and Pierre Henry -- who have carried out research in the Sea of Marmara, south of Istanbul, with the hope of being able to predict quakes one day -- say the city will suffer one major tremor with a magnitude of between 7.2 and 7.4.
Recent German research, however, suggested that the faultline could unleash two or three big quakes in a series rather than an extremely large one-off event. One of the authors, University of Karlsruhe geophysicist Tobias Hergert, said these quakes could be around 7.0 in magnitude. The difference is important because an 8.0-magnitude earthquake releases 30 times more energy than a quake with a magnitude of 7.0, according to the study. Source: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Date: 10-Mar-2010 15:25:40 |
