Turkey's Builders Face Probe Over Quake Ruin

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX

Aug. 20, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

ISTANBUL, Turkey —

Faced with growing public outrage, Turkey’s government Thursday ordered a criminal investigation of builders whose slipshod construction methods led to the collapse of hundreds of tall apartment complexes in this week’s deadly earthquake.

“The contractors who put up these buildings, which became graves for so many of our citizens, have committed mass murder,” Interior Minister Saadettin Tantan told reporters as the quake’s confirmed toll reached about 7,000 dead and 34,000 injured, with damage to the economy estimated at $25 billion.

A new wave of panic gripped Istanbul late Thursday after seismologists reported 210 aftershocks in just two hours, sending residents into the streets with pillows and overnight bags. The governor of Bursa province, about 50 miles south of here, urged its 2 million residents to sleep outside.

Near the quake’s epicenter in Izmit, 65 miles east of Istanbul, airborne firefighters finally brought a temblor-provoked blaze at the country’s largest refinery under control, officials said, though it was still burning. And rescuers saved an 8-year-old Turkish boy who had been trapped for more than two days under the wreckage of his home.

But Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit admitted Thursday what many Turks feared--not even the hundreds of professional rescue workers sent in from around the world will be able to save all those under the rubble.

“Thousands of buildings are in ruins,” he said. “It is not possible to reach all of them.”

Losing hope for buried loved ones, many survivors frustrated over the government’s inadequate rescue effort turned their anger against unscrupulous builders who had fueled a construction boom in Turkey’s industrial heartland--80 miles of urban sprawl along the Marmara Sea--that was hit hard by the quake.

Quake survivors and construction specialists said the frequent use of poor-quality concrete and too-thin reinforcing bars in never-inspected apartment buildings contributed heavily to the toll of the magnitude 7.4 quake, which struck early Tuesday as most of Turkey slept.

Furious residents of Yalova, about 40 miles southeast of Istanbul, burned the car of a local contractor who vanished from the city after 20 apartment towers he had built there over the past seven years collapsed in the 45-second temblor, killing at least 30 occupants, two Turkish newspapers reported.

“Murderers!” the Hurriyet newspaper proclaimed Wednesday above a picture of a lifeless young woman half-buried in rubble. “Once again rotten buildings, once again thieving building contractors,” the paper commented.

In Avcilar, a new neighborhood on the western edge of Istanbul where 41 buildings collapsed and at least 138 people died, relatives of some victims banded together, collected telltale samples of broken concrete and vowed to take a contractor to court.

“He cheated on everything,” declared Kenan Isleyici, stooping in the rubble of the six-story Gunduz building on Avcilar Avenue as British and Dutch rescue teams joined Turkish soldiers in the search for victims.

The remains of Isleyici’s cousin, Ercan Kulpu, a 30-year-old shoemaker, were partly visible under a sandwich-like pile of concrete slabs that had collapsed in less than a minute, killing Kulpu’s wife, 3-year-old daughter and 22 neighbors along with him.

Holding a tape measure, Isleyici reported that reinforcing bars running through the building’s collapsed support beams were about one-third of an inch in circumference instead of the building-code standard of nearly three-quarters of an inch. Then he picked up a chunk of concrete.

“This is what they need to look into,” he said bitterly, crushing the concrete in his bare hand. “It was mostly sand.”

Apartment buildings remained intact on three sides of the Gunduz complex--a checkerboard pattern of destruction visible throughout the quake zone. Survivors said the pattern was not random; the difference between buildings that fell and those that stood, they said, was in the quality of construction.

Relatives said the shoemaker chose his $50,000 three-bedroom apartment because it was on a main thoroughfare close to a bus stop. Soon after moving in four years ago, they said, Kulpu and his wife noticed that the building shook whenever heavy trucks drove past, but they weren’t worried that inspectors never came.

“It’s not part of our culture to worry about our rights of homeowners,” Isleyici said.

Rural Turks have poured into the industrial northwest looking for work in recent decades, swelling Istanbul’s population from 1 million to about 10 million since 1960. The migrants first throw up unlicensed shantytowns known as gecekondos--Turkish for “built overnight”--and then move on to affordable but often slapdash towers of concrete and cinder block built under municipal permit but rarely inspected.

Although Turkey is crisscrossed by seismic fault lines that produce frequent tremors as intense as those in Japan or Mexico, officials rarely force contractors to make those towers quake-resistant.

“The money and political rewards gained from quick-and-dirty construction outweigh all other considerations,” said Erhan Isuzen, an advisor to the mayor of Sisli, an Istanbul suburb. “It’s entirely up to the conscience of the contractor.”

Contractors can trim 10% or more from their costs by skimping on material and kick back part of the savings to dissuade municipal inspectors from noticing violations, construction specialists say.

Bribes are seldom necessary, however. Turkey’s central government gave municipalities the power to enforce residential building codes in 1985, but they never hired and trained enough people for the task.

“An inspector’s name is written at the building site, but most of the time he approves the building without even visiting it,” said a government official. “This is the general rule in Turkey.”

Big-city politicians have been more interested in using building permits as patronage--to win and keep the support of favored builders and the recent migrants allowed to occupy ever-scarce urban housing, according to building specialists and government officials.

“Anyone can become a contractor in this country--a shopkeeper, a barber, anyone who can put together the money,” said Fikri Kaya, head of Turkey’s Chamber of Civil Engineers.

For years his organization has lobbied Turkey’s Housing Ministry for higher standards, offering its laboratories and experts to help inspectors do their work. He says the ministry has never answered.

“After every earthquake they make do with blaming a few engineers and contractors,” Kaya said. “If you want to find the real guilty ones, you have to look at successive housing ministers and the officials at the ministry.”

Last summer, 14 architects and contractors were arrested after 144 people died in a quake in the southern city of Adana. They were soon released.

An earlier burst of resolve followed the 1992 quake that killed 653 people in Erzincan, a city in eastern Turkey. Turkish officials began a project supported by the World Bank to review construction regulations and recommend changes to tighten laws.

That review is still underway, and officials said Thursday that it must be broadened.

“It’s a national issue, and all Turks have to be involved in this process of assessing what needs to be done now--nongovernmental organizations, professional chambers, the parliament,” said Fikret Unlu, a Cabinet minister and member of the prime minister’s new earthquake task force. “We must have a long and hard national debate.”

Western specialists have long advised Turkey that the answer is rather simple: The best way to enforce building codes is to oblige owners to insure their buildings with private insurers; it would then be in everyone’s interest to build to high safety standards.

Such a proposal, under study for years, has not yet reached parliament.

“No one learned a lesson from the bitter experiences of the past,” said Ali Sinan, head of the architecture department at Selcuk University in the city of Konya. “I hope they learn from this one.”

Times special correspondent Amberin Zaman in Istanbul contributed to this report.

Updates and additional photos on the earthquake in Turkey are available on The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com.

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How to Help

These aid agencies are among the many accepting contributions for assistance to victims of the earthquake in Turkey. For a more complete list, please see The Times’ Web site at https://www.latimes.com/turkeyaid.

Adventist Development and

Relief Agency

Turkey Earthquake Relief Fund

P.O. Box 4289

Silver Spring, MD 20914

Tel: (800) 424-2372

www.adra.org

AmeriCares

161 Cherry St.

New Canaan, CT 06840

Tel: (800) 486-HELP

(financial donations only)