After February’s catastrophic earthquakes, Turkey must now repair its broken cities and towns. But can Erdogan and his government deliver? By Samuel Lovett in The Telegraph on April 13, 2023.
The scene is one of devastation: streets once filled with life now echo with the muffled crunch of glass and rubble under boot. Buildings stand hollow and empty, long since abandoned. Only the dead remain – buried beneath the twisted wreckages of a city reduced to ruins.
Nearly seven weeks after the 7.8 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes struck, the Telegraph encountered endless destruction like this across the towns and cities of southeast Turkey, returning to the region to understand how exactly it rebuilds itself.
Even now, the full scale of the disaster remains difficult to comprehend: 50,000 dead, 107,200 injured, and millions forced from their homes.
Estimates suggest the earthquakes, which affected 11 provinces across an area of approximately 42,479 square miles, will cost the Turkish government $103 billion, with thousands of buildings destroyed and a further 300,000 set to be demolished.
The event has been described by the World Health Organization as Europe’s “worst natural disaster for a century” – surpassing the summer heatwaves of 2003, which killed tens of thousands across the continent, and the 1999 İzmit earthquake in northern Turkey, during which more than 18,000 people died.
The recovery and rebuild needed to get southeast Turkey back on its feet is monumental in scope, with few equivalents in modern European history. Excluding war, only the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986 is estimated to be more costly as a disaster.
There is much to consider: does the government have a clear plan in place? Will it lead reconstruction efforts? Or will it defer to the private sector – and, if so, what of the poor building practices that experts say led to the tragedy in the first place?
Many of these manufacturing mistakes cannot be repeated. Like Japan or California, southeast Turkey sits on one of the most active fault systems in the world and is certain to be rocked by earthquakes again.
There is also the question of how the government supports the three million people who have fled their homes and are now displaced. More than half of these are living in informal shelters without proper access to food and water, where the threat of disease looms large.
And what of those who have not only lost their homes but also their limbs, or suffered life-changing injuries? What next for these victims as they struggle to get their lives back on track?
Such challenges are immense. Rebuilding life in Turkey will be anything but easy.
Antakya stands in silent ruins. Entire facades have been ripped off the city’s stone-block buildings, the rubble left sprawled across the streets. The domed roofs of its mosques have imploded, while its churches have collapsed into unrecognisable heaps of rock.
Around 80 per cent of Antakya’s housing stock is thought to have been damaged, with at least 1,200 of buildings completely destroyed in the historical centre of the city, which can trace its roots back to Alexander the Great.
“If there was a war and this place was bombed, I don’t think it’d be any worse,” says Dr Yasemin Didem Aktas, a UK-based engineer who, alongside a group of Turkish and British academics, is assessing the destruction wrought in Antakya and the wider region.
Across the southeast, several urban centres have met the same fate. In Nurdağı, close to the epicentre of the first earthquake, 50 per cent of the town was damaged or destroyed, while in Kahramanmaraş, a city of half a million, nearly 1,000 buildings were razed.
In total, the number of buildings to be demolished in the earthquake zone stands at 298,448, according to the government, while up to 210 million tons of rubble have been created.
To facilitate a rapid and efficient rebuild, maintaining the economic pulse of Turkey’s damaged cities and towns needs to be the immediate priority.
Southeast Turkey accounted for 16 per cent of the nation’s agricultural production last year, while Hatay province, one of the worst-affected areas, has a large steel industry based in the city of Iseknduren, which, like Antakya, suffered catastrophic levels of destruction.
“We need to get our factories running again. We need to convince factory owners to stay and provide interim accommodation for workers as their homes are rebuilt,” says Ömer Bitargil, a local architect who is guiding Dr Aktas’ team around Antakya.
“This will stop people from leaving Hatay or Antakya for good. They will come back with their family because they’re going to earn money. Everything is money.”
According to a UN report, four million workers have been affected in the earthquake zone. Without new livelihoods, these individuals will lose an average of $230 per month, the report adds.
To address this, the government has launched an initiative aimed at getting people into temporary paid work as they search for permanent employment.
The scheme, which is being rolled out across 35 cities in southeast Turkey, aims to provide 10,000 short-term jobs – from factory work to aiding city clean-ups – for those who are out of work.
In another example of collaboration between the public and private sectors, on the edge of Kahramanmaraş, contractors have been commissioned by the government to install 2,100 temporary mobile containers for displaced families.
When the Telegraph visited last month, builders were fitting the accommodation with electricity and water and sewage supplies. Some of the units, which will house a total of 3,000 families, even have kitchens and cooking hobs.
Such accommodation is simply a halfway house to get the displaced out of dirty, crowded camps and into safe spaces, making it easier to return to education or work. Last month, the government said it planned to install 100,000 containers in southeast Turkey.
Engin, an official overseeing the project in Kahramanmaraş, said families will be housed in the units for between six to 10 months before being moved into permanent homes, which are being constructed elsewhere by the same contractor.
However, private building firms such as these will be under intense scrutiny in the months ahead; many will naturally be concerned that corners could be cut, as seen in the past.
In 2018, more than 50 per cent of all buildings in Turkey – almost 13 million structures – had been constructed illegally, according to government data.
The problem, says Dr Aktas, is not the technical knowhow behind Turkish engineering, which is “among the best in the world,” but the implementation of this knowledge. If contractors and government officials aren’t willing to put into practice this expertise, it becomes redundant.
“The bridge between the academics’ technical understanding of the issue, including their contribution to regulations, and the actual implementation is massive,” she says.
This is where the willingness of Turkey’s leaders to turn a blind eye to improper practices comes into play.
In 2018, the Turkish government launched an amnesty whereby owners of buildings constructed after 1999, and which breached a broad set of basic licensing, design and safety rules, could pay to have these properties legitimised.
Some 7.4 million applications were approved by President Erdoğan’s government in a year, raising roughly $4.2 billion in building registration fees.
The practice is “a cancer,” says Dr Aktas – and unlikely to be accepted politically for a second time as the Turkish government contemplates how it will foot the bill for its rebuild.
The government estimates that the cost of last month’s massive earthquakes is nearly $103.6 billion – equivalent to more than 10 per cent of Turkey’s entire economy in 2022.
Dr Kit Miyamoto, the director of Miyamoto International, a structural engineering and disaster-risk reduction firm, says that one way to cut down on costs is to avoid unnecessarily demolishing buildings that can in fact be made safe.
The focus, he adds, should be on repairing the 200,000 or so properties in the region that have only sustained light, non-structural damage.
“These are what we define as the low-hanging fruits,” Dr Miyamoto explains. “You can really impact drastically the amount of displaced people by fixing these and getting them filled.”
Such an approach costs far less money compared to the $1 million that would be typically spent constructing a 5 to 8-story apartment block on top of a demolished building, he says.
Dr Miyamoto estimates that, in all, government spending on the response will cover 10 to 15 per cent of public needs. “That’s the global standard,” he says. “The rest of it comes from the private sector.”
The Turkish Housing Development Administration (TOKI), which handles the government’s mass building projects, will be a major public player in the rebuild.
By chance, before February 6, TOKI had carried out extensive land assessments in cities across Turkey, including the southeast, to assess soil quality as part of plans to build new earthquake-resilient buildings at a range of prices, says Professor Haluk Özener, director of the Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute.
These plots of lands, which have been earmarked for construction, will give the government a headstart in meeting its target of building 300,000 new homes within a year. “It’s ambitious,” says Prof Özener. “But it can be done.”
Two months on from the earthquakes, 1.6 million self-settled people are still living in informal sites, housed in tents or makeshift shelters with limited or no access to health services.
Until these refugees are moved into purpose-built accommodation, Turkey’s humanitarian crisis will only further deteriorate.
“There are many needs,” says Gökhan Erkutlu, from the Turkish humanitarian group Support to Life (SFL). “The most pressing at the moment is related to water and sanitation, which is needed for cleaning, showering and for toilets. This water is missing.”
Site assessments carried out last month by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) showed that more than a third of settlements do not have showers, while 25 per cent lacked sufficient drinking water supplies. Toilets appear to be in shortage, too.
Families living in an official displacement site in Kahramanmaraş told The Telegraph that the camp’s 12,000 residents are meant to receive 1 litre of water every day to clean themselves, but said this supply often isn’t delivered.
Unsurprisingly, outbreaks of scabies and fleas have been reported in multiple camps across the southeast. Cholera also remains a threat; the disease has already flared up in northwestern Syria.
Yet the IOM’s estimates suggest that basic medicine is unavailable in nearly a quarter of all displacement sites.
“In the early days of the earthquake, the need for medicine in acute emergency cases was high, but now there is a greater need for those used in chronic diseases,” says Alper Mavi, a regional coordinator for IBC, a local humanitarian group based in Gaziantep.
There is the need to cater for peoples psychological demands, too. Dr Yaqeen Sikander, a clinical psychologist who has been assessing the mental health of those now based in humanitarian tents, said the trauma of living through the earthquakes could have a “life-long effect on people,” especially children.
Sara Odaimi, an eight-year-old from Gaziantep, a city of two million, was dragged out from her bed by her mother when the earthquake struck. She laughs about it now, insisting “I wasn’t scared at all”. But her father, Ahmad, warns that the disaster has left its mark.
“Sara has refused to sleep by herself since the earthquake, she needs to be near us at night,” he says. “She’s only recently been able to step back in her home.”
Ready-to-eat foods and hot meals are also desperately needed. In more than 50 per cent of camps reviewed by the UN at the start of March, residents were being forced to purchase their own food.
Families living in the Kahramanmaraş camp said they had resorted to buying food from local sellers visiting the camp, adding that the general amount of aid flowing into the site has reduced in recent weeks.
There is widespread desperation. There have been reports of theft and angry confrontations between refugees and the police who hold guard. In the rain, the tents can become flooded, spoiling the few possessions that the camp’s residents have to their name.
Some of the camp’s inhabitants will be moved to the temporary containers being constructed on the edge of Kahramanmaraş, but when the Telegraph visited last month, there was no indication of when this might be – or who would be selected to move across.
“At least I have this tent,” says Ahmed Maraşali from inside what has become his home, surrounded by his family. “I have the shirt on my back and somewhere to go. But I don’t know what the future holds.”
On his first day under the rubble, Khalid Hajabdulah remembers speaking with a man stood on top of the collapsed concrete above him. “Are you Mohammed?” the man asked as he desperately searched for his relative. Khalid, just 15, said his name and asked to be saved, but the man moved on.
Others came and went, calling out for their lost loved ones among the destroyed apartment block in Antakya, only to be met with Khalid’s voice. Still no-one helped. Alone in the darkness, with his legs trapped beneath a fallen wall, Khalid waited for death’s embrace.
“I prayed to stay alive but felt I wouldn’t survive,” he says.
Khalid was buried in the remains of his Aunt’s second-floor apartment, along with four of his relatives. After three days, he was the only one to be pulled out alive.
Initially, he assumed his legs were fine. All feeling had been lost after 24 hours, but there were no obvious wounds when he emerged from the rubble. However, the hospital said his legs had been crushed and starved of oxygen, so would need to be amputated.
Khalid, a Syrian refugee who fled Idlib province in 2013 due to conflict, is one of thousands of people in Turkey to have suffered life-changing injuries in February’s earthquakes.
These individuals who required it will have already undergone surgery, and now face lengthy journeys to rebuild their minds and bodies as they learn to adapt to their new lives.
Dr Vasim Çablut is overseeing Khalid’s care at the National Syrian Project for Prosthetic Limbs (NSPPL) centre in Reyhanlı, a town close to Syria. His facility has provided fake limbs, physio and psychotherapy for Syrian refugees in Turkey since 2014 – all free of charge.
If the recipient is a young child or teenager, multiple limbs will need to be made and fitted over several months and years as they grow, Dr Çablut explains.
After a patient is fitted with a limb, multiple follow-up consultation sessions, which cover rehab and psychosocial services, are provided by the centre over the course of 12 months.
“We help them to continue their lives,” says Dr Çablut. “We allow them to live, to study, to even work. Our aim is to empower people to continue their lives.”
Prior to the earthquakes, the centre had a year-long backlog of patients waiting to receive a prosthetic limb. “But the situation was stable with the numbers we were receiving. We had a plan and we could implement it,” says Dr Çablut.
That all changed on February 6. The centre, partnered with the humanitarian organisation Relief International, now faces a wave of demand from earthquake victims across southeast Turkey.
In the years ahead, the NSPPL centre could treat thousands of people who lost a limb to the disaster, Dr Çablut predicts, adding that the centre requires more funding to continue operating.
After six months, Khalid’s wounds will have fully healed, meaning he’s able to receive a fake limb, but it will likely be years before he and other victims can access one.
“It will be two years before many of the earthquake victims get a limb as we need to get through the current waiting list,” says Dr Çablut.
Like many others, Khalid has no choice but to wait. He and his family are camped out in front of the centre, where he receives daily rehab and mental support, but it’s not clear how long they will be able to remain here, with all of their lives now on pause.
Nonetheless, despite the trauma and loss he has endured, Khalid remains defiant. “Before I wanted to be a soldier,” he says. “Now, I want to be a doctor so I can help people in the same way that people have helped me.”