Performance of reinforced concrete buildings during, Turkey earthquake, and seismic design and construction practise in Turkey

On August 17, 1999, a Mw 7.4 earthquake occurred
on the 1500-km-long North Anatolian fault in northwestern
Turkey. The epicenter of the earthquake was near
Izmit, 90 km east of Istanbul (Fig. 1). Following the
earthquake, the Pacific Earthquake Engineering
Research Center dispatched a reconnaissance team to the
epicentral region to learn first hand about the performance
of the civil infrastructure. The geographic region
that was impacted by the earthquake was somewhat narrow
banded and centered around the fault, and stretched
from Istanbul in the west to Go¨lyaka and Du¨zce in the
east. Damage to building construction was severe and
widespread (Sezen et al. [1], Aschheim [2], Scawthorn
[3]). Estimates for economic losses were around 20
billion US dollars. The official death toll was over
17,200, with some 44,000 people injured and thousands
left homeless. Some 77,300 homes and businesses were
destroyed, and 244,500 were damaged. The majority of
deaths and injuries were in the cities of Kocaeli, Sakarya,
and Yalova.
This paper describes briefly the state-of-practice for
building seismic design and construction in Turkey, and
compares the US and Turkish codes. The performance
of the reinforced concrete frame and wall buildings and
their components during the 1999 Kocaeli earthquake is
presented, and evaluated considering the seismic design
and construction practice in the epicentral region.
Download File