US magazine defines Istanbul airport as earthquake-safe

The U.S. “Risk Management” magazine and its blog showed Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen International Airport as one of the safest five places on Earth.

Thursday, 02 December 2010 15:13

A U.S. magazine defined the airport in the Asian side of Istanbul as earthquake-safe.

The U.S. “Risk Management” magazine and its blog “www.riskmanagementmonitor.com” showed Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen International Airport as one of the safest five places on Earth.

“The world’s largest seismically isolated building, the new international terminal at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gokcen Airport, is now complete and open for business. Stretching across more than 2 million square feet, the terminal doesn?t sit directly on the soil, but rather on more than 300 isolators, bearings that can move side-to-side during an earthquake. The whole building moves as a single unit, which prevents damage from uneven forces acting on the structure,” the magazine said.

The magazine said, “given that a massive, 7.4-magnitude temblor struck Turkey in 1999, killing some 17,000 and destroying billions of dollars worth of property, this seems like a great development in a city that geologists expect to see another major quake within the next few decades.”

The other safe buildings listed in the magazine are “Fort Knox-U.S. bullion depository”, “Svalsgaard Doomsday Seed Vault-a seed bank”, “Proof 7 World Trade Center”, “Bahnhof’s Underground Data Center.”

The Risk Management Monitor is the official blog of Risk Management magazine and provides daily stories, commentary, interviews, podcasts and videos related to the world of risk management and insurance.

Istanbul’s second airport Sabiha Gokcen hosted 6.27 million passengers in the first seven months of 2010, up 94 percent from the same period a year earlier.

The airport almost caught last year’s passenger number of 6.6 million in the first seven months of 2010. 4.2 million of total passengers used domestic flights. The number of domestic passengers rose 92 percent.

International passengers also increased 98 percent to 1.99 million. In July only, Sabiha Gokcen hosted 1.27 million passengers.

Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, situated on the Asian side of Istanbul, opened in 2001. In 2007, ISG, a consortium of Malaysia Airports Holdings, India’s GMR Infrastructure and Turkey’s Limak clinched the rights to Istanbul’s second airport with a 1.9 billion-euro bid.

AA