- By Anna Foster
- BBC Middle East Correspondent, Istanbul
2 hours ago
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Mesut Muttaliboglu’s building in Istanbul recently failed an earthquake safety test – and now he has to move out
The crack in Mesut Muttaliboglu’s bedroom wall is so wide that he can insert a car key.
He flips it sideways, and with a flick of his wrist, a large lump of plaster flies off the wall and crashes to the floor.
So he and his family are moving out of the apartment they’ve lived in for the last 15 years. The entire building was ordered to be demolished after failing an earthquake safety test. There is a very high probability that a tremor would bring this whole block down.
Fear is growing here in Istanbul.
The two powerful earthquakes in southern Turkey, which claimed almost 50,000 lives, have brought a new urgency to the largest city. Home to 15 million people and lying on the North Anatolian Fault Line, experts predict it will have its own major earthquake before 2030.
About 70% of the city’s buildings were constructed prior to legislative changes that enforced stricter building standards in 1999 and are therefore considered potentially unsafe. Just three months ago, a study said a quake here could kill up to 90,000 people. Now it’s about getting the city fit.
Mesut knows only too well what devastation an earthquake can wreak. He has just returned from the epicenter in the southern city of Kahramanmaras where he lost relatives. As we chatted in his now-empty apartment, he described the moment he found out.
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The February earthquake devastated the city of Kahramanmaras
“It happened at 4:17 a.m., a relative called and we all woke up screaming.” Mesut’s face crumples in tears and he turns to collect himself. “It’s a terrible situation. We couldn’t come [to Kahramanmaras] three days because of snow and when we hit the rubble it was so hard. I can not describe it. I hope God doesn’t let anyone have that experience.”
When Mesut returned to Istanbul, the authorities had turned off the electricity and water in his apartment. “I brought her back just so we could move. They gave me two more days.”
“The municipality had written to warn us about this, but the situation was not resolved due to denials from neighbors. We knew our utilities were going to shut down and we were about to leave here, but then the quake happened and everything went to pieces.”
Since the earthquakes in the south, the Istanbul Municipality has received more than 100,000 new applications for building safety inspections. The waiting list for a shot is three months, then four, and getting longer.
Both tenants and landlords can apply now, but some are not yet doing so due to the financial implications. Compensation for those forced to move out of demolished buildings is small. There are no official figures showing how many fail the test.
The city’s mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, has promised more training for rescue teams and the preparation of temporary shelters that could accommodate up to 4.5 million people after an earthquake. But many fear it’s still not enough.
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Engineers like Dr. Kurtulus Atasever warn that many buildings in Istanbul have architectural features that weaken their structure
A walk down an average street in Istanbul will tell you why. Many of the buildings have special design features that can cause them to collapse when under pressure during an earthquake.
dr Kurtulus Atasever, a civil and earthquake engineer, met me to point out some of them. We were standing on an empty, stone-strewn patch of earth that was once the foundation of a building. When Istanbul was hit by a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in 2019, it was so severely damaged that it had to be demolished. Up and down the street, its neighbors share many of the same flaws.
Good quality concrete is vital, he tells me. And the architecture is crucial. “We have some overhangs here. In this type of building we have some weak or soft floors. There are also short supports, these are actually all typical construction problems.”
Simply put, each of them weakens a building at ground level, which means that if there’s an earthquake, it’ll struggle to hold up the floors above. An overhang makes the rest of the building wider than the base. Soft floors are where the ground floor is higher than the floors above. Short columns do not have enough length compared to their diameter.
They can be done safely, emphasizes Dr. Atasever, but only if the design has been carefully considered and planned. This is rare, especially in old buildings.
We’re standing in the shadow of Yasemin Suleymanoglu’s house and I ask her if she’s worried about the block of flats it’s in. She holds her daughter’s hand and looks up at the facade of the building. “I don’t feel safe here,” she says.
“Our building shook badly during the 2019 earthquake and the pillars of the building across the street broke. I’ve been feeling uneasy since that sound, and we’re really scared of this latest tremor. We lose our sleep because it can hit us at any time. And I think we’re vulnerable because our building is old.
The next step is the development of a 50 km (31 miles) fiber optic early warning system. But for such a huge city, it’s hard to know where people would take shelter even if they knew an earthquake was coming.
As images of the devastation in the south continue to fill Turkish television screens, these concerns are now front and center for much of Istanbul’s population. And just two months before important presidential and parliamentary elections, it really matters.
Overnight, the earthquake and its aftermath have become a key issue for voters alongside Turkey’s economic crisis. Many are not happy with the government’s handling of either. The aftershocks here are not only physical, they are also political.