Life on a fault line: Turkey marks earthquake awareness week

Continually on alert against earthquakes as a country sitting on hundreds of fault lines, Turkey marks Earthquake Awareness Week with a series of events on disaster preparedness.

Turkey sits on 485 active fault lines that may lead to magnitude 5.5 earthquakes and above, according to a report by the state-run General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration (MTA). Following the deaths of more than 18,000 people in the Marmara earthquake of 1999, which devastated the country's northwestern cities in one of the worst earthquakes in recent memory, Turkey seeks ways to increase survival rates in potential future disasters.

The Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), founded about one decade after the earthquake to ensure better responses to earthquakes and other large-scale disasters, spearheads the efforts to teach the public how to be prepared against the quakes. AFAD's Earthquake Simulation Center in the capital city of Ankara particularly caters to students in an effort to prepare younger generations against the disasters. Thousands of students are hosted at the center, where they experience an earthquake first-hand and are taught what to do in case of an earthquake.

AFAD President Fuat Oktay said yesterday in a written statement that 95 percent of the population lives in areas prone to earthquakes and that more than 75 percent of large industrial sites were in the country's notorious "earthquake belt." Oktay said AFAD adopted a strategic plan to minimize the risks caused by earthquakes, and educating the public on the disasters was one of the significant steps of the plan. He also said that the state-run agency set up the country's first deep well seismographic network on the Northern Anatolia Fault Line, the main fault line straddling through an area including the most populated city, Istanbul, and the network was even monitoring and analyzing the earthquakes of the smallest magnitude. AFAD also launched a system to predict the damage from any devastating earthquake for better coordination of first-response crews in case of a disaster.

The government launched an urban transformation campaign in 2012 to demolish buildings under risk. Buildings not built to earthquake safety standards and delayed response in the aftermath led to the high rate of casualties in the 1999 earthquake. The earthquake razed poorly constructed buildings to the ground and emergency personnel struggled to cope with the scope of the disaster. Turkey has also implemented regulations for mandatory reinforcement of undamaged buildings against earthquakes and introduced compulsory earthquake insurance to compensate property losses in case of disasters following the 1999 earthquake.