Risk register · entry
Q2 · The CoconutTurkey-Syria earthquakes
Twin M7.8 quakes; building-code amnesties left 13M non-compliant structures.
The rare, high-impact event that was always coming, and was always going to be called unforeseeable afterwards.
Why this room
The payoff structure is what moves it: routine noncompliance produces a simple, bounded cost (a fine, a mild tremor shrugged off) typical of Q2, but decades of amnestied stock convert the tail into a complex, correlated, catastrophic loss when a large quake finally arrives, the hallmark of Q4's fat-tailed behavior.
The record
- First quake M7.8 at 04:17:35 TRT, second M7.7 (some sources report M7.5) roughly 9 hours later, 95 km away, both on Feb 6 2023certain
- Turkey deaths: 53,537; Syria deaths: 5,951 to 8,476; combined total commonly cited above 55,000 or 59,000certain
- 107,213 injured in Turkeylikely
- Economic damage: approx. US$148.8 billion in Turkey (about 9% of GDP), US$9 billion in Syrialikely
- 1.5 to 2.7 million people displaced/homeless (range varies by source and date)uncertain
- 24,921 buildings collapsed or heavily damaged out of roughly 170,000 surveyed in the affected regionlikely
- Turkey's total building stock roughly 13 million, more than half (6.5m+) out of compliance per official datalikely
- Nine rounds of construction amnesty (imar barisi) between 2002 and 2023likely
- 2018 amnesty round: 10+ million applications, $3+ billion collected in fees/taxeslikely
- Erdogan 2018 claim that amnesty 'solved the housing problems of 144,556 people' (direct quote as reported)certain
- 130+ contractors targeted with arrest warrants within a week; later over 600 named suspectslikely
- Turkey's Transparency International CPI rank fell from 54th (2012) to 101st (2022)likely
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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