Houses should be built with anti-earthquake techniques
The Turkish government is well aware that the country hinges on active fault zones in the Earth’s surface, with a long record of earthquake activity. Yet it allowed builders to flout earthquake resistance norms while constructing buildings. Earthquake Preparedness Even if there is a reliable system that warns a day or a month in advance of a major earthquake, how should it be used? If it were up to you, would you try to evacuate millions of people from the potentially affected area? Would they be ready to go? Where would they live and what would they do if they came back to see their destroyed homes? The best way to prepare for an earthquake disaster, and what Erdogan had the power to do, is to build houses and infrastructure using earthquake-resistant techniques.
Walls should lean towards each other
In this way, people are not killed during an earthquake and they still have homes. There are many ways that buildings can be designed and constructed to withstand earthquakes without collapsing. In an area prone to major earthquakes, a multi-storey building should be designed in such a way that when the ground starts to move, the outer walls on both sides bend in the same direction. On the contrary, if the walls are made to move away from each other, then the middle floors become ineffective in a few moments when an earthquake occurs, causing the upper floors to collapse on the lower floors. This is what happened in Turkey with deadly effect.
the foundation must be deep
Builders can prevent this type of damage by structurally tying the floors and walls together, without making the building frame so rigid that it breaks rather than bends slightly. This could mean more steel and less concrete. Other solutions are possible at a higher cost. For example, digging a foundation deeper and anchoring it to the rock below the soil will reduce damage in an earthquake (as it moves less than the soil), or making them flexible enough to insulate the building from ground movement. Can be mounted on pad. It is a tragedy that the Turkish government knew all this.
Buildings made by breaking the rules in Turkey
They have introduced a series of progressively more stringent seismic building codes, claiming to have learned lessons from the 1999 earthquake near the city of Izmit, near Istanbul, which killed 17,000 people. But journalists are reporting how these building regulations have been widely flouted in Turkey. Adopting earthquake resistant measures can increase the cost of a construction project by perhaps 20%, so the temptation to ignore the rules is obvious. In this case, the government not only failed to enforce its own building bye-laws, it also encouraged builders to flout these bye-laws and extorted huge sums from them in lieu of ‘construction amnesty’.
(David Rothery, Professor, Planetary Geosciences, The Open University)