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 quadrant
Building outside code carries a small and knowable cost, a fine or nothing at all. Nine rounds of amnesty between 2002 and 2023 turned that into a stock of non-compliant buildings numbering in the millions, all of which fail in the same minute when a large enough quake arrives. Each decision was cheap. The sum of them was not.
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
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