Latest Quake Shows Failure of Building Safety Rules

After Turkey’s monster earthquake in August, municipal inspectors ruled that this town’s damaged supermarket was structurally unsafe. They painted a large red X on the outside and ordered it torn down.

The owner, Necdet Yilmaz, protested, but the mayor backed the inspectors. Then the businessman traveled to Ankara, the Turkish capital, and coaxed a bureaucrat into a fateful decision. The order was reversed.

Soon a blue X appeared over the red one, the six-story building was remodeled, and the Bicakcioglu Supermarket, occupying the first two floors, was back in business.

The market is now a crumpled heap of concrete--yet another monument to this quake-prone country’s fatally flawed building safety practices. Yilmaz and at least seven employees and customers were crushed to death there in a new temblor Friday evening. Dozens of people may have been in the structure when it collapsed, rescue workers said.

Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said Sunday that 349 people were confirmed dead in four towns wrecked by the latest quake--a slight downward revision from Saturday’s count. An additional 2,386 were injured, he said.

Duzce, at the epicenter of Friday’s magnitude 7.2 shock in Turkey’s industrial northwest, was crowded all weekend with soldiers, police, doctors and rescue workers--evidence that the government was far better prepared to cope with a major quake than it was three months ago. Twenty-three countries sent in emergency crews.

But townspeople said the collapse of the sprawling supermarket onto a crowd of early evening shoppers was just one example of how vulnerable Turks remain in a state that cannot protect them from man-made deathtraps.

“How can you enforce the building code when there are politicians in Ankara who will overrule you for a bribe?” asked an official at the town hall who declined to be identified.

The Aug. 17 temblor, which registered 7.4 and killed at least 17,000 people over a wider swath of the northwest, exposed massive cheating by building contractors and the corrupt inspectors who allowed them to skimp on the quality of cement and steel reinforcing rods. More than 21,000 multistory apartment buildings collapsed.

Friday’s quake exposed the flimsiness of the official mea culpas and pledges of August to tighten up on inspections. Authorities said the temblor flattened 102 buildings, some of which had been damaged three months ago but were reoccupied in recent weeks.

Two new laws promised in August by Ecevit’s government are still in the drafting stage at the Public Works Ministry. One would stiffen penalties for building code violations, raising the maximum prison sentence from seven years to 20. The other would require contractors to buy insurance on their buildings.

Meanwhile, the government has fallen short of its pledge to reinspect every building in the quake-stricken region, and some orders to tear down buildings have been reversed by the courts.

“The surveys since August have been conducted far too hastily,” said Yavuz Onen, president of Turkey’s independent chamber of architects. “A lot of red Xs have become blue Xs. Clearly there’s a lot of official malpractice.

“In other cases, people have acted on their own to erase the red Xs from their buildings,” he added. “It’s not just the government’s fault. You have to blame the people for not learning a lesson.”

Thousands of Turks have been living in tent shelters since the August quake. As cold autumn rains fell earlier this month, municipal authorities ordered many to return to their homes, which were officially deemed safe, while others went home on their own to buildings that were still condemned.

Turkan Buyuk said she refused to believe the inspectors’ word that her five-story building was habitable. She found an apartment in a sturdier building, signed a lease and collected cardboard boxes to pack her family’s belongings.

Friday’s quake brought down the building Buyuk was about to leave, just as she, her daughter and mother-in-law were packing. Their fourth-floor apartment ended up in a heap just above ground level, and Buyuk briefly lost consciousness, but the three women escaped with minor wounds.

The quake struck the mountainous Bolu region midway between Ankara and Istanbul at 6:57 p.m.

In the foothill towns of Duzce, Kaynasli, Bolu and Golyaka, mourners prayed for their dead Sunday over trenches hastily dug to comply with the Muslim rituals requiring speedy burial. Rescue crews searched for a third night in freezing temperatures.

The last rescue was recorded here Sunday morning when Saziye Bulut emerged after 41 hours under the wreckage of her home.

“I’ll probably have to live in a tent now,” she told her Turkish rescuers. “But you must definitely come to tea.”

Friday’s quake struck towns with a total population of about 200,000--less than one-tenth the number affected by the August quake. Few of the residential buildings flattened on Friday were higher than five stories, and some had remained abandoned since August. Also, the latest quake caught many people on the street; the previous one struck at 3:02 a.m., as most victims slept.

As many as 60 shoppers and employees may have been in the Bicakcioglu Supermarket when it collapsed, according to Turkish, German and Czech rescue workers at the scene. The building occupied an entire city block.

By late Sunday, eight bodies had been recovered and just three people had emerged alive--an 18-year-old greengrocer and two younger boys sent by their father to buy eggs.

Neclet Kayrak, a Turkish rescue worker, said the crews heard knocking from under the rubble Sunday and extended an ultrasensitive microphone on a pole in the direction of the sound.

“I heard what sounded like a man, a woman and a child. I could not make out the words, but they did not sound panicked,” he said.

Later, a German rescuer strapped a small video camera to his body and burrowed into a ground-floor crawl space less than 20 inches high, relaying images to a screen outside. They showed none of those trapped inside.