Two dozen student volleyball players, four teachers and 12 parents visiting Turkey for a competition this month checked into the Grand Isias Hotel in the southern city of Adiyaman. When a powerful earthquake struck on February 6, the building collapsed and killed dozens of people including everyone in the entourage except for four adults.
A university engineer who examined the wreckage found indications of weak concrete and insufficient steel reinforcements. He and his colleagues wrote in a preliminary report, concluding that shoddy construction had left the building vulnerable, even to smaller quakes.
In the weeks since, the Turkish authorities have arrested three men connected to the hotel on unspecified charges as part of a wide-ranging dragnet targeting hundreds of building contractors and owners among others suspected of criminal negligence that contributed to deadly building collapses.
The suspects— some nabbed at the airport with stacks of cash or perp-walked on national television— have become the focus of public rage, with many now questioning whether they padded their profits by flouting the codes put in place over the last two decades to make buildings more quake resistant.
Construction industry experts say that contractors responsible for flawed buildings should be punished. But they also caution that targeting only them obscures gross negligence throughout the system meant to make buildings safe, which may have contributed to thousands of deaths.
During most of the past decade, contractors could freely choose which private companies to hire to inspect their buildings, an arrangement that the government eventually concluded had led to “illegal commercial ties”.
“Putting the blame only on the contractors would be the easy way out,” said Ali Ozgunduz, a former state prosecutor. So far, the government has investigated 564 people suspected of connections to collapsed buildings, the Anadolu news agency reported on Wednesday. Of those, 160 have been detained pending trial.
New York Times News Service
