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ADIYAMAN, Turkey — Warnings have been coming for years: this city was unprepared for a powerful earthquake. Thousands of buildings were at risk.
For at least a decade, engineers, architects and planners had consistently expressed concerns that buildings in Adiyaman — a southern city of more than 290,000 people — were sloppily constructed, built before inspection standards were tightened, or erected on unstable farmland along a path of the world’s most active fault lines.
But when the ground began to shake on February 6, local and national authorities had done little to protect people living in some of the city’s most vulnerable buildings, residents and engineers said – despite evidence of which civil protection officials are well aware were the danger.
According to the government, more than 6,000 people were killed in Adiyaman province, most of them in the city itself. More than 1,200 buildings collapsed. Another 3,000 to 4,000 buildings — or more than 10 percent of the city’s inventory — are “severely damaged,” Adiyaman Mayor Suleyman Kilinc told The Washington Post.
Turkish officials have acknowledged delays in initial rescue efforts. But they also saw the tragedy as inevitable, given the frightening magnitude of the two earthquakes — the “disaster of the century,” as they call it — and the advanced age of many of the collapsed buildings.
The old Turkish city that no longer existed after the earthquakes
“Ninety-eight percent of them were built before 1999,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, referring to the year of Turkey’s last catastrophic earthquake near Istanbul, which killed more than 17,000 people and prompted tightening of regulations and conducted inspections.
But newer buildings in Adiyaman and elsewhere also collapsed. And there was no reason why older buildings couldn’t have been cleared or strengthened, local experts in Adiyaman said. The risks were conveyed loud and clear at meetings with disaster relief officials at the provincial, municipal and local levels, participants said. At some meetings, experts showed simulations showing how quickly the ground would accelerate in a major earthquake and identified the neighborhoods most at risk.
They told government officials that the threat was “serious” and that “certain areas needed to be redesigned,” said Ulas Inan Sevimli, a professor of geological engineering at Adiyaman University, who attended a series of meetings with officials from the area’s disaster relief efforts from 2020. The extent of the destruction after the earthquakes was “expected,” he said.
“We have given the necessary warnings,” he added.
The warnings were deemed urgent enough for a report by AFAD, the government’s disaster management agency, The study, released three months before the earthquake, identified serious weaknesses in construction practice and nearly 1,600 buildings in need of an “urgent” risk assessment, including in the city center. It proposed a four-year project, ending in 2026, to identify buildings “with insufficient earthquake resistance” but did not say what measures should be taken to protect residents.
For Adiyaman, the recommendations came too little and too late.
Buildings on popular Ataturk Boulevard in Adiyaman, Turkey were damaged or destroyed after two earthquakes on February 6. (Video: David Enders)
And this city wasn’t alone in its lack of preparation. Recent government risk assessments had identified worrying vulnerabilities for other communities in southern Turkey’s earthquake zone because of unsafe buildings, weak ground underneath or insufficient awareness of the risk by citizens. A 2021 report from Gaziantep province listed Nurdagi and Islahiye, two cities devastated by the earthquakes, as those likely to suffer damage.
The reports are now part of the national reckoning of government errors before the earthquakes and have led to growing unease among people living on other fault zones in Turkey, including in Istanbul, its most populous city, where residents have begun inspections of their buildings to promote .
The destruction here extends across central Ataturk Boulevard, where people were fatally crushed in apartment blocks, two-story apartment buildings and a local hotel. South of the boulevard, guarded settlements clustered around wells and built on former farmland. To the north, at the foot of Mount Karadag, there is less debris but buildings collapsed there too. Only a few corners of the city were spared.
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Prosecutors have swarmed across Adiyaman in the wake of the earthquake, collecting samples to investigate why buildings collapsed. Some buckled in a way that suggests inferior design and construction, experts told The Post. Several of the city’s developers were arrested.
Among the fallen buildings were three six-story apartment blocks of the Euphrates complex, where more than 60 people died. A survivor of the collapse, Halil Yanardag, who has lived in one of the buildings since 2006, said he could not recall a visit from building inspectors or warnings from authorities that the complex could be at risk from an earthquake — not even after cracks surfaced three years ago during an earthquake in a town more than a hundred miles away.
In the event of a major earthquake, he thought, he and his wife would be sitting outside in the complex’s garden, surrounded by cypress trees. But when it finally came, his building collapsed “in the first 10 seconds,” he said. “We never thought it would be this bad.”
After the earthquakes, attention focused on the dangers of the Erdogan government’s real estate boom and the granting of thousands of “amnesties” to buildings that failed to meet safety standards.
But the problems here, housing specialists said, are more deeply rooted in a system long characterized by weak government oversight of unscrupulous or unskilled contractors, summed up in a maxim echoed by the city’s architects and engineers: That Lives of the residents of Adiyaman depended on the “conscience” of those who built their houses.
Despite recent improvements to the system, they said, aging homes are still vulnerable.
Kilinc, the mayor, said “not much work has been done to fortify” older buildings in Adiyaman, adding that the focus is on “serious inspections” for new construction. The building that housed the mayor’s office was among those that collapsed on February 6.
“In Turkey, unfortunately, there are hundreds of thousands of buildings from the past,” he said. “Buildings that are troublesome.”
Turkey’s earthquake building codes were drafted to keep up with the buoyant population growth in urban centers that began in the 1960s, said Polat Gulkan, professor of civil engineering at Baskent University in Ankara. In Adiyaman and the formerly agricultural south, this often meant building on converted farmland.
Satellite images from 2003-2023 show a construction boom in Adiyaman, Turkey. (Video: TWP)
Historically, the Turkish government has taken a “laissez-faire” approach to disasters, consisting mainly of promises to build new homes after old buildings have been destroyed, he said. Seismic regulations from 1975 were updated in 1998. After next year’s deadly earthquake, earthquake codes and building inspection rules were regularly tightened, most recently in 2018. If followed, they would have prevented the kind of “shameful collapses” that occurred on February 21, 6 Gulkan said.
“That’s the goal,” he said. But the “practice” of building construction in Turkey “is not up to standards,” he said. “Newer buildings have been built quickly but generally sloppily.”
Osman Özdemir, who has been the Adiyaman representative of Turkey’s Chamber of Geological Engineers for 19 years, has witnessed the broken system firsthand. When he moved to the city in 2001 after graduating from Istanbul University, construction was going on there “without soil surveys,” he said.
“There were settlements on creek beds, i.e. where there are high groundwater levels. There are areas where if you dig two meters deep you can achieve liquefaction,” he said, referring to a process in earthquakes when the ground gives way and loses its ability to support the structure above. He was one of the first to bring a bore survey machine to the region.
By then, “drill-based ground survey reports had not been prepared” in several major cities in southern Turkey – including others that suffered losses during recent earthquakes. Prior to 2003, basic engineering principles were not applied in the region. And even after that, he said, cutbacks were made as developers tried to keep costs down.
The Chamber of Engineers has repeatedly tried to sound the alarm with the public, through the media and with officials, including the local branch of AFAD, Özdemir said. In meetings with the agency, including online during the pandemic, and another at a local hotel in 2021: “We told them this: This earthquake can come, and old buildings will absolutely not withstand this earthquake – even if it did they are new buildings withstand the earthquake, they will be severely damaged.”
Destroyed buildings can be found all over Adiyaman, Turkey after two earthquakes on February 6th. (Video: David Enders)
There were “7,279 buildings in the neighborhoods most at risk of earthquake damage,” the AFAD report concluded. Almost 60,000 people lived in them, it said. The report, called the Provincial Disaster Risk Reduction Plan, covered 2021 but was released in November 2022, according to the agency’s website. Similar reports have been made in other provinces.
The report outlined a list of alarming “weaknesses” in Adiyaman’s preparedness for earthquakes and other disasters. The local authorities did not work with experienced engineers. Efforts at urban transformation — an approach the Erdogan government used to rebuild aging neighborhoods — have been “progressing slowly,” the report said, adding that there is one Adiyaman’s failure to use “proper research methods” in zoning decisions.
The report said that drillers conducting soil and geological surveys were hampered by “insufficient knowledge”, that most contractors acted haphazardly because they were “unlicensed and had insufficient levels of education” and that no one could take adequate “against illegal, uncontrolled structures took place”.
Despite the warnings, the authorities “didn’t do any work and didn’t take any action,” Özdemir said. “These reports went to Ankara and stayed on dusty shelves. It goes on as always.”
Government officials indicated their hands were tied, said Sevimli of Adiyaman University. “They defended themselves and said, ‘How can we tell people to leave their homes if they’re not robust?'”
A spokesman for AFAD did not respond to questions about whether the government had acted on warnings given to local civil protection officials during the meetings.
Murat Kurum, Turkey’s Minister for Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change, said in recent years about 6.7 million buildings in the country needed to be rebuilt because of structural problems, including 1.5 million in urgent need of renovation. A ministry spokesman did not respond to questions about how many of the vulnerable buildings were in Adiyaman, whether such buildings had been inspected in the city, and what measures, if any, had been taken to minimize the danger.
Older buildings seemed to exist in a regulatory vacuum, experts said – left undisturbed by government inspectors unless residents raised safety concerns. But for residents, raising the alarm could have unwanted consequences, including paying to strengthen the building or contracting with a developer to rebuild a demolished building.
“That’s not possible for a citizen. Citizens are already living in difficult economic conditions,” said Özdemir.
“Catastrophic Collapses”
The three apartment buildings in Adiyaman’s Green City Complex, which residents say was completed in 2005, did not collapse all at once. Building C collapsed in the first earthquake, killing at least 24 residents. Their neighbors in Buildings A and B had nine hours to flee before the second earthquake brought down their houses too.
Mustafa Kucukaslan, a 47-year-old civil servant who lived in Building B, returned with his family a few days after the earthquake and tried to salvage some clothes from the rubble. He and his wife said they were not aware of any problems with the building, which appeared “strong”, in contrast to much older buildings around the city, which were clearly crumbling. They did not remember visits from government inspectors.
A few days later, Mahmut Tekin, 53, was standing on a large pile of rubble at an adjacent complex called Blue City, trying to reconstruct the building’s features while contemplating his loss. “My wife and son died here,” he said, pointing to a large, deep hole in the rubble. Tekin was working in Berlin and flew home to Turkey as soon as he heard the news. His son Latif, 26, planned to join him in Germany to work in a hospital. When Latif’s body was found, his mother was in his arms, Tekin said.
A residential complex called Blue City in Adiyaman, Turkey was destroyed by earthquakes on February 6. (Video: David Enders)
The developer of the Blue City complex was arrested in Istanbul last week, according to state media. He is one of dozens of people, including developers and others involved in construction, who have been arrested by authorities in the weeks since the earthquakes, while Erdogan’s government grapples with mounting public anger.
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The Post shared videos and photos taken in Adiyaman with more than half a dozen technical experts, including civil and structural engineers, architects and seismologists. Determining the exact cause of a building collapse requires in-person inspections, they said, and takes time. But there were patterns in the Adiyaman ruins that pointed to likely flaws in the design and construction process, they said, including inadequate seismic support in reinforced concrete structures.
In Green City and Blue City, among other developments, The Post found buildings that appeared to have collapsed – a common sight in earthquake-damaged buildings whose vertical members have failed.
“The catastrophic collapses we see in the images, where the columns simply gave way and the floors scorched on top of each other, are due to a lack of lateral restraint systems and reinforced connections between the beams and columns,” said Professor Emily So of Architectural Engineering of Cambridge University.
Short or insufficient “overlap length” — the overlapping of rebars — is also a potential problem at Adiyaman, she added, saying such design flaws can contribute to structural failure.
Widespread diagonal cracks on the exterior of buildings are evidence of shear forces, or the horizontal force generated by the earthquake, said Jonathan Stewart, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Though some may remain habitable, the buildings need to be inspected for additional cracks in key structural areas, he said. “If that’s in place, it’s possible these structures are on the verge of collapse.”
Elsewhere, concrete appeared to have been sheared from a tangle of rebar designed to reinforce it. Some rebar appeared smooth, not ribbed or “deformed” – a design that helps it grip concrete.
An engineer visiting the Green City buildings with Post reporters demonstrated how chunks of concrete can be easily pulverized from the rubble.
An engineer visiting the Green City buildings with Post reporters demonstrated how chunks of concrete can be easily pulverized from the rubble. (Video: TWP)
“The crushability… of the chunk of concrete is problematic,” Stewart said. “It indicates poor quality or insufficient cement, which is the binder in concrete. This reduces the compressive strength.”
Some of the same observations were made by experts after Turkey’s last major earthquake almost a quarter of a century ago.
“What you describe is consistent with what emerged from the 1999 earthquake,” So said. “The five- and six-story buildings were particularly vulnerable and of dubious build quality.”
Erdogan, who faces his toughest election yet in the coming months, has promised to quickly rebuild devastated cities and make new homes safer. During a trip to Adiyaman on Monday, he said the government would “do whatever is necessary to prepare all of our cities for disasters as quickly as possible,” including ending the type of building practices experts said are destroying the city would have contributed.
“We will not allow construction in areas near the fault line and in areas where soil liquefaction is occurring,” Erdogan said, adding that experts including engineers, architects and urban planners would be consulted.
Many buildings in Adiyaman survived the earthquake largely unscathed, including a library, a youth center and schools, local engineers said – evidence, they added, that buildings deemed valuable could be protected. The new homes in Adiyaman would be built closer to the mountain than on the plain below, Kilinc said.
“It is believed to be more suitable, but further ground studies are being conducted,” he said. “It is believed that it will be more solid.”
Oakford reported from New York. David Enders contributed to this report.