Turkish Earthquake

[lankeela]

if they know its on a major fault line why do they still build there and particularly high rise buildings?

[jno]

south eastern Turkey has been overwhelmed in the last decade or more with refugees from Syria fleeing Isis - about 3.5 million of them. The Turks have done their best to put them up.

[tomus42]

Probably the same reason they keep building on fault lines and flood plains elsewhere. People need somewhere to live and there's money to be made.

[Old_Geezer]

They do that along fault lines everywhere. Check California out.

[Buenchico]

Construction firms in Turkey are legally obliged to take the possibility of earthquakes into consideration when designing and erecting new buildings:
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-updates-earthquake-map-after-21-years-124948

However building still need to be placed where people live and work. It's simply impossible to evacuate everyone (together with the businesses that employ them and the farms that feed them) to those parts of Turkey where the risk of earthquakes is lower.

Similarly, US cities such as San Francisco and Chicago continue to see more and more development, despite the fact that they're both already overdue for an earthquake on the same scale, or possibly far bigger than, the one that's hit Turkey and Syria. You can't simply move entire cities!

[Old_Geezer]

You can move entire cities if the will is there. If the quake destroys everything one may be obliged to after that anyway.

[douglas9401]

TV footage suggests that some buildings are more 'to code' than others.
Whatever, it's scary and horrible for those stuck in it all and investigations and recriminations can wait a few weeks.

[fender62]

on holiday in turkey once i noticed the scaffolding was made of wood,
cant imagine building regs, quality of materials workmanship etc.

[jno]

I doubt many high-rises are involved. Apartment blocks in Gaziantep are like Paris, seven storeys or so - though that's quite high enough to be disastrous if they come down.

I wonder if Gaziantep's gypsy girl survived.

https://tinyurl.com/mryffard

[Canary42]

Hopefully any rebuilding can follow the Japanese system where they are now constructed to actually survive major quakes - probably constrained by cost though, Turkey is not a rich country.

My heart goes out to the bereaved families and to those rendered homeless.

[ichkeria]

Zelensky has signed a decree that Ukraine will provide humanitarian assistance.

The reporting yesterday highlighted just how many earthquakes happen on a daily basis all over the world.

[jno]

there are a lot, but this one was unusually strong (or rather, both were) - 7.8 is a high reading though well short of the Chilean record

[ToraToraTora]

Here's one for the arithmeticians, It's 7.8 on the Richter Scale which is logarithmic, so an 8 point is 10 times worse than a 7 point. So how may timed stronger is a 7.9 than a 7.8?

[ToraToraTora]

If it helps log(base 10)100 is 2 so 10²=100 so basically log is another way of writing indices.

[nero2024]

fender62
https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/collections/wooden-scaffolding/#:~:text=Their%20designs%20benefit%20from%20the,make%20a%20variety%20of%20forms.

[DTCwordfan]

No fault of the builders, perhaps?

[THECORBYLOON]

TORATORATORA, a 7.9 is about 26% greater than a 7.8.

[DTCwordfan]

well I haven't done the maths but I thought that a full Richter magnitude is ten times the power of the next lower one..full points of course.

[ichkeria]

An Israeli and an Iranian military transport aircraft stand side by side at Gaziantep airport!