Past calamity should serve as a lesson, experts say

GAZIANTEP, Turkiye — The earthquakes that struck southeastern Turkiye and northern Syria last week and caused massive human losses and damage should serve as a wake-up call for earthquake preparedness, experts say.

More than 12,000 buildings have either collapsed or sustained serious damage in the quakes, Turkiye's Minister of Environment and Climate Change Murat Kurum said on Friday.

As Turkiye sits on active fault lines, scientists have regularly issued warnings for citizens and the government to be prepared for an earthquake, especially since the last major one in 1999. It hit the Marmara region and killed more than 17,000.

"The 1999 earthquake should have served as a lesson, but we choose not to take that lesson," Naci Gorur, a geologist who is a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, said on the private TV channel Haberturk on Wednesday.

Gorur said he and his colleagues had long warned about a possible major earthquake in the vast quake-affected areas, but the possibility had been ignored.

"To die in an earthquake is not destiny; it is a lack of management," Ovgun Ahmet Ercan, also a well-known geoscientist in Turkiye, said on Friday.

Replying to criticism that the quake response was not swift enough, Turkiye's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said it was impossible to get prepared for a calamity like the earthquakes that struck the country last week.

The Turkish government has been collecting an earthquake tax in the wake of the 1999 quake to create a fund for disaster preparedness and relief efforts and has also imposed stricter building codes to protect new structures in the event of earthquakes.

"Despite (new) regulations, they have been broken by contractors as well as state and municipal authorities who have not been vigilant enough or have turned a blind eye," said Suleyman Ergin, an urban planner in the capital Ankara.

In addition, about 100,000 buildings in the earthquake zone have been granted construction amnesties by the government since 1999, which means poorly built structures can remain standing, Ergin said.

The multistory buildings in the quake-affected areas had largely been built before the seismic design was conceived, he said.

Xinhua