Innovation - Spring 2024

F

EATURE

Many container sites were built following the earthquakes, such as this one in Hatay, to house displaced people. Photo: Allison Chen.

Rebuilding is the best option The location of redevelopment varies in Türkiye. Some communities are being rebuilt in place, which takes time as buildings need to be demolished, rubble removed, and reconstruction started. In other places, the redevelopment is happening a few kilometers away. Chen says in Turkish communities with extensive damage, the preference seems to be to rebuild. “With so many damaged and collapsed buildings and communities, it makes sense to start again instead of trying to keep a few sporadically throughout.” Chen, a structural engineer, says the trip opened her eyes to what earthquakes can do and the importance of designing for more than “life safety”—which is how we design most buildings. It means that occupants can safely exit a building after the design earthquake, but the buildings can’t be occupiable until they’re remediated or retrofitted. “This trip has left me inspired and driven to do everything I can within our regulatory mandate and within my network to protect the public relating to seismic preparedness, response, and recovery,” says Chen.

moderately damaged, and 1.3 million were lightly damaged. There was about $76.6 billion in residential loses. Rubble and debris were still scattered everywhere, which was a shocking sight, says Chen. “Schools and hospitals were not exempt from the damage, though far fewer of them were damaged. Most of them fared really well,” she says, adding only 17 percent of schools collapsed or were severely damaged. “Overall, the public infrastructure in Türkiye did very, very well because it’s all designed for post-disaster performance levels or performance based to mean that it will still be functional after the earthquake. Overpasses and bridges did very well. I think two or three were damaged overall, and only a couple dams were damaged as well.” Hundreds of thousands in tents, containers Türkiye did an incredible job responding to the earthquake and immediately started the recovery effort, says Chen. Part of that work involved wide scale rapid damage assessments. That can happen quickly when thousands of volunteers are mobilized right away from all over the country. (In BC, BC Housing

offers a Rapid Damage Assessment course, developed with support from Engineers and Geoscientists BC and others, for conducting building assessments after an earthquake, flood, or windstorm.) Still, even when Turkish residents were given the okay to go home, many chose to continue living in tents and containers. People remain terrified to go inside the buildings. By May, there were 350 tent cities and more than 800,000 tents. And by September, there were 350 container cities and 187,000 containers, each one about 200-square feet and housing up to six people. “Pretty tight spaces for prolonged periods of time,” says Chen, comparing the containers to housing built in Vancouver for athletes in the 2010 Winter Olympics—a lot of repetitive designs to meet a tight deadline and the immediate needs of a large population. A big lesson learned, adds Chen, is to have the sites and the designs ready to go, so construction can begin within a month of the first main shock. No one wants a six- or 12-month waiting period to see where new housing will go and what it will look like. It needs to start right away, she says.

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Spring 2024

Innovation