The Great Garden of Samandag: When a Building Gets Hittery, Public Works Inspector Joel Pinarbasi Walks Through the Streets

In addition to tens of thousands of buildings that collapsed, Turkey’s environment and urbanization minister says 50,000 more “need to be demolished urgently.”

The debris of the two buildings is strewn across the street. The building underneath is collapsing, but the roof on one of the buildings appears to be intact.

The town’s “Great Garden,” normally a verdant green space with benches and shops, is now full of tents, likely to shelter survivors and emergency crews.

At least two large high-rise buildings, located just south of the park, have collapsed. There are more collapsed on the northern side of the park.

There are many vehicles in the area. Like in other parts of the Nurdagi, some of the buildings that are still standing have a significant amounts of debris surrounding them.

The office that Yasin tends to work from is in Ankara. A civil engineer is working in an apartment building northeast of Samandag that has been hit by an earthquake.

From the outside the building appears to be in reasonably good condition, but once he enters there’s a cinder block wall that has collapsed on the ground floor. A mess of broken tile and plaster can be seen across the entryway.

This building, like many others in urban areas in Turkey, has shops at street level and apartments on the upper floors. Unlike many structures in the area, this one is still standing. The apartments appear from the outside to be intact. But Pinarbasi points out that several support pillars on the ground floor are cracked or completely severed where they connect to the beams above them.

Now, hundreds of engineers are moving through wrecked areas of southern Turkey, as part of a process of seeing how safe the buildings are for people to be in them.

Pinarbasi volunteered as one of them, inspecting buildings and reporting initial damage assessments to the government, which he says has to make the final determination of what structures are inhabitable.

A few thin cracks in the support columns were found at the back of the building. Even worse, the concrete of the columns crumbles when they scratch at it with a hammer.

He has an app on his phone with every building in the zone marked on a map. The ones that haven’t yet been inspected are white. The building shows up as green after being checked.

He wants to build a restaurant with a large garden as a wedding venue. As they walked through the building, both of them said that there were some cracks on the walls but not on the beams and columns.

He does not care about the minor damage. There can be cracks in non-load-bearing walls — some walls may have even collapsed entirely — and the building can still be deemed structurally sound. Is there damage to the beams or the columns?

The buildings that collapsed in the disaster, due to shoddy construction, subpar materials, and failure to comply with building code, have caused a lot of outrage. Some new apartment blocks, that were advertised as being built to the highest earthquake standards, crumpled in the earthquake.

A gray four-story apartment building has been used as a base for the move up the hill from the restaurant. It sits by itself on a hillside surrounded by olive trees. It’s still intact. It has all its windows and there are no visible cracks in the facade.

Kanar and his four brothers built the building in 2008. Kanar says that he and his extended family were sleeping when the earthquake struck, but no one has slept in it since. After the trauma of the disaster they’re all afraid to go inside.

Kanar’s apartment in the aftermath of a major earthquake: “I’m afraid I won’t be here again,” she tells her mother

“It’s been very hard emotionally,” Kanar says to Pinarbasi as he leads him to the front door. When her mother is near the house she starts to cry.

More than a week after the quake, the apartments inside are in much the same condition as when the family ran out the morning of Feb. 6. The jars of tomatoes are broken in the kitchen. The refrigerator and cabinet doors are flung open and spilling their contents. Tables and even a stove are overturned.

She doesn’t want to ever come back to her apartment. “I don’t think that I will live here again,” she says as tears well up in her eyes. “How can I get out of the building with four kids? Which one am I going to choose to pick up?”

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/17/1157790902/turkey-earthquake-engineers-building-damage-inspectors

A woman says she’s looking for a house on the next hill and that’s why she wants to live in a shipping container

Structural engineering has a bigger problem than this. It has a lot of fear and anxiety about the way buildings have been constructed.

A woman named Gonul Kanar says she wants to build a small house on the property, so that she can live at the ground level. She would prefer to live in a shipping container over going back into her apartment.

Pinarbasi marks their building as not damaged in the app. Each engineer is looking at 60 buildings per day, because so many have been damaged. He and his colleague walked to the next hill.