Nearly two weeks after a pair of severe earthquakes rocked central Turkey and northern Syria, the full extent of damage to buildings and other structures is beginning to emerge. With the magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 epicenters located hundreds of kilometers apart, the area affected is vast.
The official death toll for the Feb 6. quakes has passed 46,000, with more than 40,000 dead in Turkey and more than 5,000 dead in Syria. The region also has a post-quake housing crisis, with Reuters reporting that at least 345,000 apartments are known to have been destroyed. By some estimates, up to two million people lost homes or were forced to evacuate.
While there are signs that poorly enforced building codes and subpar construction contributed to the poor performance of some recent construction in the quakes, there also are other factors at work, such as geology and settlement patterns, as seen in the extent of the damage.
“Some of the cities have been more than 50% or more completely destroyed,” says Kit Miyamoto, founder of structural engineering firm and disaster-response investigator Miyamoto International. “Places like Hatay, are [built] on a soft riverbed [geology]. Certain areas of the city look like a nuclear blast, like pictures from Hiroshima.”
In comparison, other cities in central Turkey, such as Gaziantep which is located on a mountainside, survived the quakes with relatively moderate damage and fewer collapsed buildings.
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