UB earthquake engineers: building collapses in the Turkey-Syria earthquake were not unexpected

A scene, shown in various videos, was taken following the 7.8-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors that devastated central Türkiye and northern Syria earlier this week and the pictures are horrifying. Two similarly shaped structures had different response; the one doesn't fall, but the other does.

According to UB earthquake engineers, despite the fact that collapses may seem random, there are most likely underlying explanations for this perplexing site. “There are many factors that can contribute to a building collapsing during extreme earthquake shaking, such as that measured close to the epicenters of the Feb. 6 magnitude 7.8 and magnitude 7.5 earthquakes,” says Andrew Whittaker, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering. “They can range from shaking intensity and duration, building design and detailing, quality of construction and adherence to construction documents, as well as local soil conditions, construction oversight and structural modifications.”

After the 1999 Zmit and Düzce earthquakes, Whittaker and his colleague Michael Constantinou went to Turkey to examine the infrastructure there. Later, they participated in the design and peer evaluations of hospitals, the Ataturk International Airport, the Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, and other buildings that all had seismic protective systems installed. The systems were created with the cooperation of UB researchers and facilities.

According to Constantinou, Samuel P. Capen Professor and SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, although Zmit and Düzce are hundreds of miles away from the area that was devastated earlier this week, the building stock of all three areas is similar. “In Türkiye, there are many modern buildings, mostly of reinforced concrete, designed per modern building codes, but there are also many older buildings with non-ductile concrete framing. The latter buildings are brittle and are more prone to damage or collapse during significant earthquake shaking,” Constantinou explains. “Modern reinforced concrete buildings in the United States are designed to suffer damage but not collapse in severe earthquake shaking, and a similar philosophy has been adopted in many other countries. However, modern buildings may collapse if the construction quality is poor, there are design errors, or the shaking is more intense than design basis, or due to a combination of the three,” he says.

 “Based on the published information on the ground-shaking in the epicentral region, the seismic forces would have been very high for stiff structures, and is expected that many reinforced concrete with shear walls and masonry will be more vulnerable, as opposed to modern, flexible steel moment frame buildings or seismically isolated buildings, provided of course that they are properly designed and built”, he adds.

Both Constantinou and Whittaker, professors in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, emphasize that it is far too early to draw any firm conclusions about what caused the buildings in Türkiye and Syria to collapse, and that given the extent of the damage, the causes of building-specific failures might never be known. They argue that it will be difficult to increase any country's infrastructure's ability to survive strong earthquakes because doing so could cost as much as creating new ones. “Unfortunately, there are no simple, inexpensive solutions,” says Whittaker.