Why So Many Buildings Collapsed in Turkey

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Sabrina Tavernise, and this is “The Daily.”

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The scale of death in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria is now raising questions about who is to blame. In Turkey, the government has placed that blame squarely on builders and property developers, accusing them of choosing profits over safety. But the reality is far more complicated. Today, my colleague Ben Hubbard on why a good part of the responsibility may rest with the Turkish government itself.

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It’s Tuesday, February 28.

So, Ben, we’re now at more than 50,000 dead in the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. And for weeks, the question we’ve all been asking is, how is it possible that so many people could have died? You’ve been investigating that question in Turkey, where the loss of life was, by far, the greatest. Tell us what you’ve learned so far.

The first thing we need to acknowledge is that this was a very powerful quake, and it struck a very, very large territory. So that’s what we’re starting with. And when I got to the earthquake zone, after this had happened, one of the first things that struck me is that not everything is knocked down.

You have this puzzling mosaic of, like, some areas where the buildings, at least from the outside, look more or less fine, and then, all of a sudden, you’ll find one that’s completely flat. There was one particular site that we went to where there was a work crew working, trying to rescue some people who were trapped in the rubble, and there just happened to be a bunch of volunteer construction workers who were standing around willing to help out. They were there with their hardhats and their equipment. And they were inspecting the site. And they were commenting on how the rebar that was there looked like it was poor quality, the cement looks like it was kind of weak. One of the guys literally walked over and picked up this big chunk of concrete and tore it apart with his hands.

And they were just all clicking their tongues and just really asking, what happened here? What was wrong with these buildings that fell down? How were these buildings built? Then this wondering about these buildings just turns into anger.

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And the government responds, and they respond by going after the builders.

They start by arresting construction contractors, people who were linked to some of these buildings, and then that really accelerates.

We’ve seen people who have been perp walked on national television, with their handcuffs on, marching into the police car.

So the government is really putting the focus on the construction people, saying that these people are the problem. They’re the ones who put up these buildings that weren’t strong enough.

OK. So the government is cracking down on the people it says are the guilty parties. In other words, the builders.

Right. But it turns out it’s much, much more complicated than that. I mean, we, me and my colleagues here in Istanbul, started looking into this, investigating who these people were, how the industry works, and just trying to figure out how did these buildings get built and what were the problems. Why were there buildings that came down and other ones that didn’t?

And we’re still very early in the process. It’s difficult to even identify some of these buildings and figure out who was responsible for them, who built them. But what we found is that the story really starts back in 1999. This was when you had the last, really, massive earthquake in Turkey.

This is a very powerful earthquake that hits the city of Izmit, which is not far from Istanbul.

There’s huge, huge damage to the city, collapsed buildings and people buried, and it’s just really — it’s just a terrible situation. It kills more than 17,000 people. And the government is just wildly lambasted for its response.

There’s just this sense that they had no ability to respond in time, to get rescuers, to get aid in place for survivors.

A few years later, we have this huge economic crisis that really hits people’s pocketbooks. And all of this together, this sense of just the country being so vulnerable to this terrible natural disaster, plus all of the economic pain of this crisis, just creates this huge anger at the government that had been in place at the time.

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And this new party called the Justice and Development Party rides this wave of anger.

They really campaigned on this idea that they were going to be more competent, less corrupt, and more transparent than the previous guys. I mean, the basic idea was that the previous parties had messed everything up and we’re going to come in and we’re going to do a much, much better job.

And then enough voters believe that they brought them into the parliament, and they ended up with the ability, in 2003, to name the prime minister. And they chose, at that time, this up-and-coming politician named Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

So Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who’s been running the country for 20 years now, he really rises to power in a lot of ways off the back of this bungled political response from the previous government.

It definitely contributes to his rise. And then, in the next number of years, the country really takes off.

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There’s great economic growth, and a large part of that is, really, this idea of build, build, build.

There’s large parts of society that rise into the middle class.

This idea that you as a Turkish family can have your own apartment in a nice city, this becomes a reality for huge parts of the population that were, before, quite impoverished.

And there’s just construction happening everywhere at this point.

So Erdogan’s solution after the 1999 earthquake and economic crisis is to actually invest in building and development as a way to revive Turkey’s economy.

Right. But the dark side of all this construction is that Turkey has very, very active fault lines in large parts of the country. This is a land that has histories of earthquakes going back as long as there is recorded history and, really, every reason to believe that there will be future powerful earthquakes.

So one of the things that the government is doing is really trying to reform how buildings are built, upgrading building codes, upgrading standards for materials to try to ensure that the new buildings that are built are going to be able to withstand earthquakes.

Right. Because they don’t want the buildings to collapse like they did in 1999.

Yes. And so they’ve done things like upgrading the engineering calculations that you have to do to decide how much structure you need to support a building of a certain size. There’s been work on the standards for what kind of materials you use — whether it’s concrete, or iron, or rebar, or these sorts of things — and upgrading this basically as the technology develops. And this process has been going on for a long time.

But where Turkey’s at now, everybody that we talk to basically said the codes are world class. Theoretically, these codes are some of the best that you could come up with to create earthquake-proof buildings. But when we started looking into this in the last two weeks, what really became clear is that, in a lot of cases, they’re just not followed.

Hold on. So the Turkish government realizes there’s a risk to all this construction. They upgrade their building codes. But why aren’t people following them?

Part of it is that, in the midst of this building boom, there’s this Wild West atmosphere that emerges, so you ended up having huge problems in the inspections regime. Ideally, to make sure that the rules are followed, you’re going to have smart, independent inspectors going out, looking at the sites, finding out where things are not being done correctly or poor materials are being used. And in a lot of cases, this was just not happening.

There was a practice of construction companies being able to hire private inspection companies to come out to their sites and do the inspections.

Private inspection companies? Isn’t that the government’s job?

Of course it should be the government’s job, but they were able to hire these private companies. And private inspection companies want to keep getting work, and if they get a reputation for shutting down people’s projects, they’re not going to get hired anymore, so they have an incentive to approve projects that maybe they should not.

Wow. That’s complete conflict of interest, right? That’s crazy.

Well, it gets even worse than that. Because in some cases, according to a lot of the industry professionals we talked to, construction companies would actually set up their own inspection companies, and so they would effectively be hiring themselves to inspect their own projects.

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So the government just completely abdicated responsibility for this really important function.

I would say there were significant holes in the checks that were put in place to ensure that these codes were followed, and the result of that is that there were buildings that went up that were not nearly as strong as they should have been.

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We’ll be right back.

So, Ben, you’ve just finished telling us that Turkey’s earthquake codes were really world class, but they weren’t really enforced. So is Erdogan just fine with all of this? Isn’t he worried that this could come back to bite him?

Yeah. I mean, you would think because of his history that, of all the politicians in Turkey, he would be incredibly attuned to the tremendous power that earthquakes have to affect politics, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of sign of that. And in fact, his government has been quite cavalier about it.

I mean, over the years, they’ve pushed through these things that are known as building amnesties.

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What are they?

So there are lots of buildings in Turkey that are not up to code, and over time, the government becomes aware of these. Either inspectors find that somebody has enclosed their balcony without a permit, somebody has added a few floors to their building, perhaps, to earn a bit of extra rent money, somebody has decided to sell the ground floor to some business, who cuts out some of the pillars to get more space, and this comes to the government’s attention either because inspectors find it or because the neighbors sue.

So you have these cases of code violations that just pile up and pile up, and every once in a while, the government basically issues an amnesty, where they wipe the slate clean. The way that it works is that if you have been reported for having done something to your building that violates the code, you pay a fine. And in a lot of cases, people don’t even have to fix what it is that they had the code violation for, even if it’s something like cutting the ground floor pillars of a building, which could very much make it more vulnerable than an earthquake.

So, basically, the government is waiving all of these violations despite the fact that they could lead to some pretty dangerous situations.

Right.

So, on top of the fact that the system of building inspections is pretty spotty, even when the inspections do turn something up and they find violations of the building code, the government sometimes just forgives them. But why?

Well, there’s a number of reasons. First is that the government earns money off of it. I mean, everybody who has code violations that they want forgiven, they pay a fine. In the most recent amnesty, this ended up bringing more than $4 billion into the government purse. So there’s a reason that the government likes it.

And voters really like it. People invest money in property. If you’re a hard-working Turkish family and you’ve taken your savings and you’ve bought a family apartment or a family home, the last thing you want is for the government to come and find a code violation and condemn the building or knock it down, because you’re going to lose your investment. So people love these things, and this is why they tend to happen during elections.

The most recent one was put in place during the presidential election in 2018. And the year after, Erdogan goes on the campaign trail in local elections and is basically bragging about it to people, saying, look at this great thing that we did — in this town, we forgave x number of code violations — and portraying this as this great service that we’ve done to the people. And ultimately, this most recent round of amnesty, they ended up forgiving code violations on more than 7 million units across the country.

Which sounds like a lot of units. Is it? How do I understand that number?

Yeah. I mean, it’s a country of about 80 million people, so yeah, 7 million units, it’s a lot of units.

But weren’t people worried about the safety of their homes?

I mean, there were definitely people who were concerned. There’s a whole group of seismologists in Turkey who have really been sounding the alarm and making it very clear that, according to all of the science, it’s just only a matter of time before more powerful earthquakes hit Turkey. I think a lot of them feel like nobody really listens to them.

You do have inspectors. You do have engineers and people pointing things out, I mean. There was a couple that we interviewed, two lawyers, who had filed 51 court cases against this one builder in their town because they thought that he was violating the code all over the place. So there were definitely people who were looking out for this. But there’s something that I think is just human nature in thinking about something like an earthquake, that nobody knows when it’s going to happen. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen next week. It could happen 100 years from now.

I think it’s sometimes hard, before the actual earthquake comes, for people to conceive what it’s going to look like and what it’s going to mean for their lives, and it allows people to go along with this magical thinking of, like, maybe we’ll just dodge the bullet.

Like, it’s a distant danger, not an immediate one, and therefore, I’m going to think about it on a different day. I’m not going to think about it today.

I mean, it’s not unlike climate change in that it’s this danger that people know is looming in the future. But even if you’re convinced that it’s there, it still in your daily life feels remote. And in the meantime, you have other things to worry about that feel much more pressing, and so it’s, I think, human nature to focus on the things that are right before you.

Right. But it’s incumbent on government to actually force people to do the right thing collectively. But in this case, the Turkish government didn’t. It actually made things worse, which leads me back to Erdogan. He’s arrested these builders, but what about him? Will he and his party have to pay a price for this?

Well, the big test is going to be elections. There are parliamentary and presidential elections expected in May, and these are crucial for him. I mean, he would like to stay in power. He’s been having a hard time in the polls this year, largely because of economic troubles at home.

Lots of voters were quite mad at the way that he had been running the country before the earthquake even hit. And then you have this huge natural disaster that’s killed all these people, and it’s hard to see how that benefits him at all in this election. And so he’s been — almost every day, he’s been down in the earthquake zone with this very grave look on his face, wearing this long, black coat, meeting with people who are living in tent cities, meeting with earthquake victims, and seeing the rubble, and really showing this tangible connection with this disaster that’s gone on.

And we’re going to have to wait and see how that really resonates with voters. He has not spoken much about everything that we’ve been talking about about how did all these buildings end up getting built that didn’t seem like they were done right to withstand an earthquake. The most that he said is, we as a country have things that we need to learn from this disaster, and we should do better in the future. That’s as much as we’ve gotten.

But interestingly, what he’s promised, I think the biggest promise that he’s made to his people is that we’re going to rebuild. Basically, there’s going to be more construction. He said that we’re going to start in March, and he wants to rebuild homes for all these people within a year, I mean, which is quite a remarkable and incredibly ambitious promise.

So instead of saying, we need enforcement, we really need to look at how we’re doing this, he’s saying construction is the answer.

Yeah. There’s really a doubling down on this policy that’s been such a large part of his tenure. It’s still build, build, build. That’s the solution. And Erdogan has proven over the 20 years that he’s been on the national stage that he’s a survivor.

He’s a very deft politician. And even with a challenge as large as an earthquake of this magnitude, there’s a chance that he’s going to push through and that he’s going to find a way to win this election.

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But there’s really also this sense of history echoing itself, that it was a catastrophic earthquake that helped fuel Erdogan’s rise to the national stage, and here we are 20 years later, and it’s another catastrophic earthquake that he’s got to face now and that, in a lot of ways, could really imperil his political future.

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Ben, thank you.

Thank you.

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We’ll be right back.

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Here’s what else you should know today. On Monday, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the conservative media empire that owns Fox News, acknowledged that several hosts for his networks promoted the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. In court documents released on Monday that are part of a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems, Murdoch said that Fox hosts Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo, quote, “endorsed the false theory.” He said, quote, “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight.”

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Today’s episode was produced by Will Reid, Mooj Zadie, Rob Szypko, and Asthaa Chaturvedi. It was edited by MJ Davis Lin and Lisa Chow, contains original music by Rowan Niemisto and Mario Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Sabrina Tavernise. See you tomorrow.