On Monday thousands of buildings collapsed in Turkey that theoretically should have withstood a 7.7-magnitude earthquake. Shocked, the Turks are torn between impotence and rage, but have already begun to look for culprits. The first face was put yesterday, with the arrest of him, the builder of the building that has swallowed more than seven hundred and fifty people, in Antioch (Antakya, in Turkish).
Hüseyin Yalçin Co?kun’s flight between Antalya and Istanbul was detected by the police and, when he was about to take another plane to Podgorica (Montenegro) at the same airport, the police caught up with him. The charges are not clear, but the Turks have applauded that Çoskun cannot leave the country and remains in the police station. Meanwhile, between five and six hundred people – after discounting those rescued, alive or dead – are still trapped in the Rönesans Residence, the twelve-story tome, where Çoskun sold them one of its 250 “luxury apartments”, with a large community pool. . One of the neighbors, now also buried, would be the Ghanaian international of Hatayspor, Christian Atsu.
Although the building, which fell flat, instead of collapsing, has brought several joys to the rescuers -and even more to the families- in the last three days, the limit of survival is being reached.
La Vanguardia spoke on Thursday in front of the damaged building with the relative of another victim. “My sister lived on the top floor, the one with the easiest access, but unfortunately she is on the side that the building fell towards,” he said. “Actually there were three joined blocks. First the one in the middle fell and then another and another.” At the time of the visit, the Istanbul firefighters and the volunteers from the AKUT association were in action, with very high morale from the rescues of the preceding hours.
Beneath the still-incipient token hunt for builders lies irritation about the nature of power in Turkey. Everyone knows that these (many of them from the Black Sea coast, like the parents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan) are the nerve of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Especially after the disgrace of the Fethullah Gülen brotherhood, very present in the small and medium-sized industry around Kayseri, formerly the other leg of the party.
The construction companies have not only made loads of money during Erdogan’s two decades – which have meant a great leap forward in infrastructure – but they are also going to continue to earn it with the titanic reconstruction that is coming.
The Turks are tormented by the feeling that part of this enrichment could have been at the cost of lowering the quality of the materials, circumventing anti-seismic regulations and, finally, bribing the inspectors, who come from engineering firms registered with the Ministry of Public Works.
Before the 1999 earthquake, a license from the local authorities was sufficient. Mandatory supervision by external professionals was then introduced. Then, in 2018, the AKP went a step further in the fight against corruption, by prohibiting the supervising engineer from being chosen by the construction company itself. Since then, it’s a random name on the list of registered engineers.
What Erdogan has not changed are amnesties, a practice that dates back to the 1960s. Periodically, there is a regularization of infringing homes, in exchange for a fine, the amount of which is theoretically allocated to other anti-seismic initiatives. The more accommodative point out that if all owners were forced to adopt the latest anti-seismic measures, half of the real estate park in Turkey – a middle-income country – would have to be demolished.
Newly built buildings do comply, on paper, with a strict regulation and that could be tougher. The result is visible in cities like Iskenderun, where almost all the houses that have collapsed are between twenty-five and fifty years old and have more than five floors (four, at least). While modern towers, with few exceptions, have suffered damage but have endured.
On the other hand, in Antioquia and, apparently, also in other affected localities, quite a few modern buildings have collapsed. In the case of the aforementioned Rönesans Residence and other blocks on the slope of Inönü boulevard, in the same city, an engineer stationed there and consulted by this correspondent attributes the cause, not to the materials, but “to the instability of the terrain.”
The detained builder has had an unexpected defender on television. Lütfu Savas, mayor of the metropolitan region for the secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP), who has said that Çoskun is “an idealist, who surely complied with all the rules” and that “he cannot be blamed for an earthquake to nobody”. He also recalled that he had been nothing less than president of the Provincial Guild of Architects. Touted as “a slice of paradise,” his “Renaissance of Him” ??looked interesting in the prospects, though rather lackluster in reality, as googlemaps show, where he still stands.
