The different Turkish and foreign rescue bodies continue to work to help the victims of the 7.8 magnitude earthquake, on the Richter seismological scale, which affected Turkey and Syria last Monday. Now the Turkish authorities are targeting real estate companies and about 100 people linked to this industry under the presumption of not having followed building regulations.
Many cities in southwestern Turkey were heavily affected by the quake, mainly the city of Gaziantep (ground zero). According to an official count, more than 12,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged by the earthquake in Turkey, and a part of Syria, where more than 20,000 people died.
The police detained at the Istanbul airport the promoter of a residence with 250 apartments located in the province of Hatay, which completely collapsed after the earthquake. According to the local television channel NTV, last Friday a first complaint was filed in Diyarbakir (southeastern Turkey) for the poor quality of the concrete.
Seismic engineer Mustafa Erdik, president of the Turkish Earthquake Foundation, told the AFP agency that after the quake, “the collapse with plants that piled on top of each other was observed. We have opened private universities all over Anatolia (…) But the level of training is very low. They don’t know how to calculate », the professor is indignant, for whom the majority of graduates « are only good for making coffee », he said.
In Turkey, the construction sector has driven the economy since the year 2000. According to the sector budget report for the year 2020 and the Turkish Institute of Statistics, the number of companies operating in the real estate sector increased by 43% in ten years up to about 127,000.
