The killer jolt in Turkey

The death toll taken by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that struck Turkey's south-eastern cities of Van and Ercis and villages around them neared 300, and is likely to soar as hopes of recovering hundreds buried under the collapsed buildings alive fade. Though the loss of life in villages must be quite high given the mud-brick structures of most of the dwellings it is the apartment blocks in the cities that didn't withstand tremors, taking more lives. In the city of Ercis, some 55 buildings, including a student hostel, crumbled over their residents. Since Turkey sits on where three vast slabs of earth's crust - the Eurasian, Arabic and African plates grind into each other - high-magnitude earthquakes are not infrequent. In 1999, a 7.6 magnitude trembler struck Izmir, killing over 17,000 people. The area now hit by the quake was also struck by a strong earthquake in 1976 which killed some 3,850 people. That the losses in the latest quake are considerably less than before is because of the substantially improved disaster management the government of Turkey has put in place over the last two decades. Yet the suddenness with which earthquakes strike, it is humanly impossible to create an absolutely no-loss disaster management programme. Nature remains unconquered, and nurtures no compassion for anyone. It strikes at will; the only thing the people can do to reduce the losses caused by natural calamities is the rescue operations and post-disaster management. That the Turkish authorities reacted to the aftermath of the earthquake well in time reaching the affected people with adequate medicine, food and shelter aid, is a measure of good governance made possible by the Tayyip Erdogan government. Not only is his government very much on the place, Prime Minister Erdogan has declined foreign help saying Turkey can cope with the disaster on its own. If Turkey suffers periodically from huge seismic jolts, many other countries including Pakistan are not immune to nature's angry visitations. Pakistan was hit by a huge earthquake in 2005, followed by devastating floods in 2010 and this year again. Floods came in the wake of freakish weather, unexpected snowmelts and a little bit of our own wrongdoings. For Pakistan, the possibility of being struck by earthquakes is very real, as the country also sits on a couple of fault lines certainly adding to its vulnerability to natural calamities. The question is: How best (or worst) are we prepared to face the onslaughts of an angry Mother Nature, which can be at times as furious and destructive as the 2005 earthquake? No doubt, the said quake caused massive destruction in the mountainous areas of AJK and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa where it triggered landslides and flattened thousands of houses and in an apartment block in Islamabad, killing scores of residents. Strangely, this was the only concrete-and-steel structure in the Capital that crumbled under the impact of 7.6 magnitude quake. The October 2005 earthquake should serve as wake-up call in relation to safety aspects of other high-rise structures, which of late, are sprouting up in almost all major cities of the country, including Karachi, which too is located close enough to an active fault line. Some valuable lessons can be drawn from Japan, which is prone to regular seismic jolts. Not only is construction of high-rise structures discouraged there, even the normal low-rise structures are built on raft foundations that unlike the piles-founded buildings can absorb the intensity of severe jolts by swaying along with tremors. It is, therefore, quite pertinent that the building control departments of the government and municipal bodies make sure that earthquake-resistant guidelines are fully adhered to by the builders of apartment blocks. Likewise, the post-calamity crisis management in its present shape is quite inadequate. Even after seven years of the tragedy the rehabilitation work is not complete. And the way the aftermath of recent floods in lower Sindh is being handled is no less disappointing. Since Pakistan is likely to be a prime target of deleterious effects of the climate change, there is the need that these areas of public concern are revisited and practical steps are taken in order that the negative impact of natural disasters is neutralised as much as humanly possible. Copyright Business Recorder, 2011