Turkey should focus on quake risk management: Professor
By Barçın Yinanç,
[...]
Geology can define risky areas through different methodologies. One of them is the recurrence interval. Every fault creates earthquakes of the same magnitude with certain intervals, some in every 100 years, some in every 60 years. The last major earthquakes on the East Anatolian Fault took place around Elazığ in 1874 and 1875. I had already warned in 2005 that we could expect an earthquake in this region after more than 140 years of silence.
There are two main faults in Turkey; one is the East Anatolian and the other is the North Anatolian. The latter released its stress through successive earthquakes in the 20th century: in 1939, 1942, 1944, 1957, 1967 and finally Gölcük earthquake in 1999 [when more than 17,000 people lost their lives]. Starting from Erzincan in the east, there has been a westward progressing sequence of large earthquakes, coming all the way to Gölcük and therefore reaching the doorstep of Istanbul.
[...]
The problem is not limited to İstanbul, due to its tectonic characteristic 90 percent of the country happens to be an earthquake zone. That means major earthquakes can happen anywhere in Turkey. Whatever needs to be done in Istanbul should be done everywhere else in Turkey. Urban transformation is the gist of risk management, but we approached urban transformation as a construction project.
Unfortunately, local authorities have cold feet to be realistic and to give information to people based on scientific data. And sometimes people are interesting as well. They don’t want you to tell you where the risky areas are because they think this will diminish the value of their houses. But, as scientists, we don’t care about profits, what is essential is human life.
[...]