ANKARA – About 300,000 new residential buildings are to be built in Turkey's earthquake-stricken regions to make up for the lost housing stock, the Yeni Safak newspaper reported on Wednesday.
According to its information, the large-scale inspection revealed that more than 211,000 buildings have suffered severe or critical damage.
A total of about 370,000 buildings were inspected. It will be necessary to rebuild 400,000 buildings, of which about 300,000 is the housing stock, in the ten affected provinces.
The Directorate of Housing and Urban Development of Turkey has already started to implement the reconstruction plan.
At the first stage it will erect 30,000 buildings, and by June this figure will increase to 100,000.
Experts have revealed that 98% of the destroyed buildings were constructed before 1999, when the country experienced a devastating earthquake. After that disaster, a number of new building codes were adopted.
The experts said that the cause of the collapse of most of the buildings this time was the liquefaction of soils under the foundations of buildings. This was due to the lack of properly constructed underground utilities and engineers’ omissions in design and construction.
The soil under the buildings did not behave as a solid body, and many houses overturned with the foundations following the underground shocks.
On Feb. 6, 2023, 7.7 and 7.6-magnitude earthquakes erupted at nine-hour intervals in Turkey’s Kahramanmaras province.
Tremors, followed by hundreds of aftershocks, were felt in neighboring countries, of which Syria was the most seriously impacted.
According to the latest information, more than 35,400 people ended up as victims of natural disasters in Turkey, with over 105,000 people injured. (TASS)
