Turkey to Introduce Redevelopment Law in Response to Quake

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Turkey’s government said it would put a new urban redevelopment law to parliament by the end of the year, as it responded to concerns over poor construction standards in the wake of Sunday’s earthquake in eastern Turkey.

The decision, reported by the state Anadolu news agency, came as a 13-year-old boy was pulled from a collapsed apartment building, 108 hours after the 7.2-magnitude tremor struck towns and villages around Lake Van, according to Turkey’s emergency agency, AFAD.

The boy, Serhat Tokay, was found in Ercis, the worst-hit town. He said he’d been able to hear rescuers from the first day, but that they were unable to hear his cries until two or three layers of the building had been removed, the Anadolu reported.

While four-and-a-half days is a long time to survive trapped in an earthquake, it not unheard of. According to a 2006 George Washington University study of earthquake-to-rescue survival times, survivors were found after 48 hours in just 18 of 34 earthquakes studied. Of the 18 earthquakes, the maximum survival time recorded was two weeks.

In Japan’s earthquake and tsunami in March, survivors were found at least nine days afterward, while a devastating quake in Haiti last year produced the longest survivors on record: A 16-year-old girl was rescued after 15 days in Port-au-Prince, while a delirious 28-year-old rice-seller was found after apparently spending 27 days trapped in rubble.

The boy in Ercis was the 187th person to be rescued from buildings destroyed in the earthquake, according to AFAD.

By noon Friday, the official death toll from Turkey’s quake had risen to 573. The toll is at the low end of estimates made by seismologists, likely because the quake struck on a sunny Sunday afternoon, when many people were outdoors and children weren’t in school buildings, several of which collapsed.

Turkey is familiar with how poorly constructed buildings can devastate populations; in 1999, a tremor with an epicenter about 100 kilometers east of Istanbul killed more than 17,000 people, with poor construction standards blamed for the high toll.

It wasn’t clear on Friday what changes a new urban redevelopment law would make. According to Anadolu, the Environment and Urbanization ministry would asked be asked to draw up assessments of all buildings in the country, while houses in high-risk earthquake zones would be removed.

Tighter construction regulations have been enacted in Turkey since 1999. However, swathes of Istanbul, a city of at least 13 million, still are composed of illegal houses, often self-built by rural immigrants, who effectively squat on land that wasn’t zoned for development.

Over time, many of these so-called gecikondus have become incorporated into the city’s infrastructure. Governments have been reluctant to demolish them, for fear of losing votes. Seismologists believe there is a high risk of a major earthquake striking Istanbul, and on Thursday Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to demolish gecikondus in preparation.

“We are not going to worry about whether they will vote for us or not,” he said.

Many of the 85 buildings that collapsed in Ercis were not gecikondus, but legal apartment blocks built before the new construction regulations were introduced.

Write to Marc Champion at [email protected]

via Turkey to Introduce Redevelopment Law in Response to Quake – WSJ.com.