türkçe links to original Turkish article
(Hürriyet Newspaper, 13 February 2023)
"Built to last" and they did.
Social media is buzzing because of drone pictures taken of the middle of
the earthquake devastation in Kahramanmaraş that show a building
untouched by damage amid the ruins. Actually, there are two such
buildings situated close together- one is the TMMOB (Türk Mühendis ve
Mimar Odaları Birliği - an association for engineers and architects)
building and the other is the Mühendisleri Odası Şubesi (Chamber of
Construction Engineers Office).
In other words, these two buildings were built properly, according to
strict specifications, and withstood the two earthquakes that shook the
city last Monday. I (Hürriyet's Savaş Özbey) asked the TMMOB office
chief Yunus Emre Kaçamaz, who lost his brother and his brother's fiancé
in the tragedy, and whom I met in his building, about this "miracle" and
he said "the devastation you see is the consequence of the 'strong joist-
weak column' construction logic that prevailed prior to the 1999 (Gölçük)
earthquake, whereby the floors were built strong but the load-bearing
columns were weak. So in an earthquake, the heavy floors are too much
for the columns to bear and they crash down on one another."
"After 2012, and again in 2020, modifications were made and now
the standards are correct. The building we are sitting in and our neighbor,
the Construction Engineers Chamber building, were built by these
standards with proper iron, proper ground integration and proper
workmanship."
Buğra Dalkıran, the head of the Kahramanmaraş Construction Engineers
Chamber, told me that it was no "miracle" that the two buildings survived
intact, saying that "if a building is built according to standards it will
survive. Most of the collapsed buildings you see around you were built
in the 1990s and their cement quality is quite low." I asked him about
the building contractors that have been arrested, wondering how much
they save by cutting corners. In response, he said that "the cost of the
basic foundation of a building is about 35%-40% of the total cost. If
you cut corners to save money you only end up with about 3%-5%
less than you would have paid if you did it right. That's not much."
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