The Feb. 6 earthquake in the Southeast Anatolia region of Turkey and northern Syria has resulted in a death toll of more than 33,000 people, at least at press time. It measured 7.8 on the Richter scale.
The country’s last profoundly serious earthquake occurred in August 1999 in the city of Izmit, just south of Istanbul, and resulted in more than 17,000 deaths. More than 100,000 families lost their homes. A few weeks later, a series of earthquakes hit Greece, which resulted in the loss of another 2,000 lives.
I remember then that this was a time of close cooperation between Greece and Turkey, a hand of friendship that I think has continued to endure.
It is heartbreaking to see some destruction in a place that I remember for the kindness of its people and the beauty of its landscape.
A December 1999 report about the economic fallout of the earthquakes concluded with a “call for stricter construction standards and quality controls to reduce the loss of life and damage in any future earthquake, in or outside the region.”
“A European fund for urgent financial assistance in the event of natural disasters should be considered, as well as rapid reaction capabilities under the auspices of the [Organization for Security & Co-operation in Europe]. They should be supplemented by planning and co-ordination bodies at national and regional level, and possibly by worldwide readiness under [United Nations] auspices,” the report said.
The latest earthquake already has seen more loss of life than the 1999 disaster, a sad statistic that will grow.
Photos showing streets and areas before and after the 2023 earthquake perhaps showed one thing we all know, that is, buildings built to earthquake codes stand far less chance of falling than ones that are not.
The 1999 report mentioned several construction companies that in the earthquake did not see a single building they had built suffering irreparable damage, so standards can be met.
Turkey, like so many places, has a lot of old buildings.
When they are rebuilt, they should be done so to the highest standards of safety.
While watching the BBC News one evening, I heard one correspondent talk about how buildings opened in the last couple of years had fallen in the earthquake. They should not have done so.
Building technology exists to withstand earthquakes of this magnitude, although I imagine there is some degree of probability.
The news report showed photos of ribbon-cutting ceremonies, the type with a gigantic pair of scissors held by seven or eight people, and the same building now reduced to rubble. That should not be the case.
Will the authorities be looking at any buildings that were approved with such codes, yet have still fallen?
I would expect hotels to have a good record in fulfilling construction codes, especially if international and stock-exchange finance is involved.
Some countries have a better record of this than others, although I have no evidence Turkey is not one of these. It is not a third-world country, and in fact far from it. But on Feb. 12, the Turkish authorities, according to the BBC, decided to act on building violations, with more than 100 warrants issued against contractors alleged to have cut corners.
The BBC added that owners who were not abiding by construction rules were given amnesty as the country went fast-forward in its goal to produce more housing.
As climate change continues, we might see more flooding, hurricanes, bush fires and other disasters, but let us hope that loss of life is kept to a minimum due to improved safety standards, both in construction and in population and emergency evacuation preparedness.
The 1999 earthquake, according to the report, struck a region of which accounted for 80% of Turkey’s industrial production.
Anatolia is not as populated and economically important, but of course what has been destroyed are families, dreams and much of one of the oldest, continually populated, culturally important regions in the world.
Mesopotamian Meanderings
The area of the latest earthquake is essentially Mesopotamia, which stretches from Gaziantep in the northwest, and pretty much the epicenter of the earthquake, through much of Syria and all of Iraq.
It is a beautiful part of the world nestled between and by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, rivers that mythology state have their sources in the Garden of Eden.
In 2010 I wanted to visit Syria, oblivious to the fact that the next year it would hurtle into civil war. It proved too difficult to get there at the same time as my wife, who was living in London when I was living in New York City, so we decided to visit the southern region of Turkey close to the Syrian border.
We flew into Gaziantep. From there, we drove across the Mesopotamian Plain to Harran, one of the oldest settlements on the planet, founded some year between the 25th and 20th centuries BC. Next, we went to Ceylanpinar on the border — I tried again to cross into Syria, but no luck on this occasion either — up to beautiful Mardin and then north to the town of Hasankeyf. The town is now completely destroyed, along with its invaluable culture and artifacts, under a new River Tigris reservoir, an act many have wailed is a cultural crime, but Turkey has defended as necessary for economic prosperity.
Turkey had to fund the reservoir on its own after international funds were turned off following criticism of the destruction the dammed river would cause.
Then we drove across the Anatolian Plain to the Kurdish “capital” of Diyarbakir, further over to the spectacular mountaintop ruins of Nemrut Daği and then down to Şanliurfa, or Urfa, where the prophet Abraham was born and later hurled into a pit by Nimrod.
There are some branded hotels in the region, mostly in Gaziantep, but there are not many, and we stayed in independents, including the Butik Castle House Hotel, Gaziantep, close to the city’s castle, which has been shown in images this week on TV as having been partially destroyed. I cannot find if it remains upright.
Gaziantep is famous as the birthplace of the dessert baklava.
The earthquakes, the aftershocks and the damage from both must have spread across the entire region we traveled in and rattled the hotels Bakay in Şanliurfa; beautiful Artuklu Kervansarayi in Mardin, and Nemrut Kervansaray in Karadut, close to Nemrut Daği.
The Hasankeyf Motel, right by the Tigris and, from what I could see, the only place to have stayed in the town, now is utterly submerged.
And poor northern Syria, already raked by war, bombing and famine. Now its people having to endure nature’s wrath, too.
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