Türkiye's lax enforcement in modern construction codes — which experts in geology and engineering have long warned about — is coming under renewed scrutiny in the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes which flattened thousands of buildings and killed more than 25,000 people across Türkiye and Syria last week.
The back-to-back earthquakes that damaged or entirely demolished at least 12,000 buildings were extremely powerful – their force magnified by the fact that they occurred at shallow depths – and the early hour at which the first magnitude-7.8 quake struck made it difficult for people to escape their buildings.
