The Turkey Earthquake: Behind the Building Failure
It has been known for many years that Turkey is In a powerful earthquake zone, so why were there so any building failures in the most recent earthquake in Turkey? More than 43,000 people died in this 7.8 magnitude earthquake, mostly due to the weak infrastructure and buildings. Turkey had installed building codes for engineers to follow when making buildings. Despite that, there were still so many buildings that collapsed during the earthquake.
The Turkish government and officials have issued arrest warrants for more than 100 engineers and building contractors who did not follow the building codes. Engineering experts had said: “The quantity of destruction in the wake of the earthquake could have been avoided if construction standards were adhered to.“
Many buildings were collapsing in on themselves during the earthquake, each story falling into another one. A reason behind this is because many of the buildings had stories at the bottom of the building with lots of windows and doors, instead of a wall or sturdier materials. If there had been more walls surrounding the building, it would have been harder for the buildings to crumble in on themselves. The collapse of buildings is also caused from the weight that is transferred to the other columns of the building if one column is cracked or broken.
Civil engineering professor, Lamia Messari-Becker of the University of Siegen in south Germany, says that a safe design to improve the structure of buildings in earthquake zones would be to use stilt like constructions since they soften the impact of the vibrations from the earthquake to the buildings. Other civil engineers have also suggested that connecting the beams and columns of a building can prevent the building from shaking by allowing the beams to go into a state of plastic deformation, causing the beams to stretch but not collapse.
There were so many deaths and injuries due to the infrastructure failures during the earthquake in Turkey, and we can only hope that engineers and contractors learn from this experience to create safer and more reliable buildings to encounter more earthquakes and natural disasters that are yet to come. Perhaps we can start right here at home in the US by carefully examining the recently constructed buildings in California, another densely populated region along a fault line.
