Twin Earthquakes Jolt Southern Turkey

During the early hours of February 6th, a series of intense earthquakes struck Turkey and Syria. Thousands of newly-constructed buildings and homes collapsed like card houses and trapped sleeping inhabitants, displacing millions of civilians. But as night came and went, help was nowhere to be seen. Death tolls slowly racked up and exceeded 50,000, marking the deadliest earthquake worldwide since 2010. How did this disaster kill so many people in a world with earthquake safety measures and building codes?

These earthquakes occurred just north of the Turkey-Syria border, located geologically in a triple junction between the Arabian, Anatolian, and African tectonic plates. These plates are constantly moving at nearly undetectable levels measured in tens of millimeters per year. However, when these plates slide past each other, they also get caught on each other. Over time, this tension builds up and finally releases what we know as an earthquake. In the case of this earthquake, it was more than two centuries of built-up tension that led to the Arabian and Anatolian plates sliding past each other by 10 feet in a blink of an eye. This was what caused the two major earthquakes: a 7.8 magnitude earthquake followed by a 7.5 magnitude aftershock which were felt more than 300 miles away in Israel and Georgia.

However, when compared to earthquakes of similar or higher magnitude, the Turkey-Syrian earthquakes have proven to be far more destructive. So how have these death tolls skyrocketed this high?

Many are pointing fingers toward the governments. Rescue workers, such as Samir Al-Chakieh, a volunteer from Lebanon, reported a severe lack of resources to assist in saving victims trapped under buildings. When Al-Chakieh’s team’s excavator broke, they had to resort to shovels and crowbars to tear apart rubble. He told the Wall Street Journal that this lack of resources led to fewer people being reached before nightfall, when temperatures dropped to -8° Celsius due to a winter storm. In Syria, access to the rebel-occupied area that was struck by the earthquake was limited to a single heavily-damaged humanitarian aid corridor across the Turkey-Syria border. As rescue groups neared the 72-hour mark, which disaster experts state to be the optimal window to rescue victims, the lack of resources provided to the government response teams showed to have failed in this race against time. 

Another factor contributing to such high death tolls was the Turkish government’s lack of enforcement of earthquake safety building codes. In 2018, Turkey introduced updated seismic building codes following several deadly earthquakes in 2011, requiring new construction to be safer and less susceptible to earthquakes. These building codes are similar to those in Japan, where a much stronger 9.0 magnitude earthquake killed fewer people in 2011. However, many of these new buildings touted to survive earthquakes of this magnitude were the ones that trapped helpless victims under concrete and rubble. In most collapses, entire buildings quickly fell and folded onto themselves, thus heavily reducing the amount of time to escape. If these buildings were actually up to earthquake standards, then the tragic impact of these collapses would not have occurred. This earthquake has now shown evidence of corner-cutting and corruption, sacrificing tens of thousands of innocent lives for monetary gain. Turkish officials have issued arrest warrants for more than a hundred contractors for connections to buildings that weren’t up to code; however, the government did not enforce the codes either.