The earthquake in Turkey offers lessons we must learn
Rescuers pulled earthquake survivors from destroyed buildings in Antakya, southeastern Turkey, Friday. Credit: AP/Hussein Malla
Some images haunt you long after you stop looking.
This latest one emerged from the devastation of the past week's earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
Amid countless scenes of toppled buildings and gnarled piles of rubble was a photo of a man sitting next to the ruins of a building in Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city near the epicenter of the quake. He is holding the hand of his 15-year-old daughter, a hand that is stretched out from beneath the concrete slabs that crushed her. You can see her forearm, what appears to be the blue fabric of the clothes she was wearing, and the mattress and bedframe on which she was lying.
Search and rescue efforts swirl around him, but there he sits, staring.
His expression is haunted, vacant, desolate. It's a grief nearly impossible to contemplate.
And then you multiply that by more than 23,000, the number beyond which the death toll had soared on Friday. When you linger on that, you remember that at the heart of the immense physical destruction wrought by such a disaster are the innumerable stories of personal loss and heartbreak.
Families and lives and communities have been disrupted and fractured and ended. You see that father and you wonder whether anyone could come back from such abject despair.
For those of us watching, even from afar, it's important that we move forward by understanding that the despair could easily be ours, that these natural calamities can strike anywhere, and that what we do before they lash us can minimize the horrors that follow. Because it's imperative for us to see in Turkey a cautionary tale.
Some of the victims paid a huge price for living in buildings alarmingly susceptible to collapse from earthquakes, in a region known for them.
In 1999, more than 17,000 people were killed by an earthquake in a different region of Turkey. Many buildings made of concrete but lacking the reinforcement of steel simply pancaked, the floors collapsing one on top of the other and all of them on top of the people inside. Turkey adopted new building standards after that, but preexisting structures are still vulnerable, and reporting from Turkey suggests that the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has presided over a corrupt construction boom in which enforcement of the new standards was lax. More than 6,400 buildings are estimated to have been destroyed this time.
"It’s difficult to watch this tragedy unfold, especially since we’ve known for a long time that the buildings in the region were not designed to withstand earthquakes,” David Wald, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said in a statement.
Questions also persist about how $4 billion raised by Turkey's "earthquake taxes" — levied since that 1999 quake and meant for emergency preparedness — has been spent. A lack of transparency has been cited.
The analogies for us are clear.
Turkey's earthquakes are our hurricanes and tornadoes and forest fires. California has its own history of quakes. And when we build in areas prone to these disasters, and fail to build properly in these areas, we invite the same devastation. As the climate changes, and as we face questions about the spending of federal funds, these mistakes become critical.
In the aftermath of these calamities, desperate survivors often vote with their feet, leaving their homelands for the promise of a better life elsewhere. Already, nations in Europe are preparing for the prospect of another mass exodus to their borders, another crisis with which we are familiar.
We must do more than mourn with a man who lost a daughter. Or we will be mourning, too.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
