Turkey to End Effort to Find Quake Survivors

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Turkey’s government said on Saturday it would call off efforts to find survivors in the wreckage of last weekend’s powerful earthquake by the end of the day, as the official death toll from the 7.2 magnitude tremor rose to 582.

The decision came just a day after a 13 year-old boy was pulled alive from the rubble and the government said it would put a new urban redevelopment law to Parliament by the end of the year, aimed at razing substandard buildings that might collapse in future earthquakes.

Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay said that to date 455 people had died in Ercis alone, a town of 80,000 people on the northern shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey, according to the state Anadolu news agency. Sixty-one people died in the regional center Van and 66 in villages, Mr. Atalay said. Eighty-four buildings collapsed in Ercis and six in Van, he said. More than 2,000 homes collapsed in the villages.

“Search and rescue efforts are under way in four buildings in Ercis, and efforts will be completed this evening,” Mr. Ataly told reporters, according to Anadolu.

The last person to be found alive in the search was Serhat Tokay, 13-year-old boy pulled from a collapsed apartment building in Ercis 108 hours after Sunday’s tremor.

The boy said he had 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, Anadolu reported.

While four-and-a-half days is a long time to survive trapped under rubble from an earthquake, it isn’t 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.

Mr. Atalay said a total of 231 people had been rescued since the quake.

While a crushing blow to the relatively small community of Ercis, the toll is at the low end of estimates made by seismologists when the quake first struck, likely because it occurred 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 exactly what changes a new urban redevelopment law would make, but they appeared aimed at making it easier for the government to condemn and demolish buildings considered at risk. According to Anadolu, the Environment and Urbanization ministry would 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 gecekondus 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 gecekondus 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 gecekondus, but legal apartment blocks built before the new construction regulations were introduced. Poor implementation of the new regulations means that many new buildings also are substandard, largely because civil engineers appointed by municipalities to enforce them are unqualified and frequently issue licenses without visiting the properties, according to a report submitted to parliament by the Turkish Chamber of Civil Engineers last year.

Media reports suggest the process is also distorted by corruption. Opposition politicians said new legislation wasn’t needed to improve construction standards or demolish illegal and substandard buildings, noting that previous similar pledges have gone unfulfilled.

Write to Marc Champion at [email protected]

via Turkey to End Effort to Find Quake Survivors – WSJ.com.