WHEN THE quake hit, the apartment block in Osmaniye, a city in southern Turkey, where Halise Sen had once lived collapsed like a house of cards, burying her former neighbours under nine floors of concrete. Mrs Sen, the head of the local chamber of architects, looks over the wreckage. “There’s no reinforced steel here,” she says, “so the concrete lost its strength and the columns collapsed, along with the floors, as soon as the ground started to shake.”

None of the blocks had basements, says her husband Mustafa, a former developer. Buildings with such weak foundations were doomed in a strong earthquake, he adds. Mustafa, who now grows olives and walnuts, stopped working in the construction sector years ago. Other contractors were undercutting his prices and ignoring building codes. “If we used 100 tonnes of iron in a building, they would use 90 tonnes,” he says. Osmaniye sits near an active faultline. “I knew we were on the brink of catastrophe,” he says.

That catastrophe struck on February 6th, in the form of two earthquakes, of magnitudes 7.8 and 7.5. They are the deadliest in Turkey’s modern history. Along the length of the impact zone, which stretches from the country’s Mediterranean coast to the Kurdish southeast, thousands of buildings, some more than a dozen floors high, have been flattened. At least 30,000 are dead in Turkey alone. Across the border in Syria, the death toll has surpassed 3,500.

More than 30,000 rescue workers, accompanied by locals and emergency teams from dozens of countries, are working around the clock to locate survivors. Miracles happen. More than six days after the quake a baby was pulled from the rubble. Turkish firefighters, miners and construction workers are everywhere, removing wreckage and delivering help, food and supplies.

But the rescue effort increasingly resembles a mass exhumation. Tens of thousands of people are still thought to be buried under the wreckage. In Kahramanmaras, a city of more than 500,000, smoke from fires that broke out as a result of the quake (or were started by people trying to keep warm) envelops mounds of rubble that stretch for entire city blocks. The same smoke, accompanied by the thickening stench of death, covers Adiyaman, more than 100km to the east. A Kurdish family huddles and weeps as rescue teams pull five dead relatives from the debris. A woman faints.

Across the region, millions of people made homeless sleep in tent cities provided by the country’s emergency-relief agency, in mosques, schools, libraries or in their own cars. Few dare enter their homes, even those seemingly untouched by the quakes. Some have nowhere to go. Mehmet, a cleric in Adiyaman, sleeps in a garage covered with a tarp along with 20 relatives. More than 30 of his family members are dead.

The delayed response and a shortage of heavy equipment compounded the suffering. Emergency teams took days to reach cities like Adiyaman. By then the voices of survivors were growing weaker or falling silent. In places like Sekeroba, a picturesque village under snow-capped mountains where at least 200 people are thought to have died, residents dug through the rubble themselves and brought the dead to a nearby hospital. “There was a tent there,” says Bilal Sut, a local man, “and inside the bodies were piled up one on top of another.”

The biggest cause of deaths, however, may have been shoddy building standards, corruption and bad policymaking. All are part of Turkey’s economic model, which is powered by construction and rent-seeking. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, bears much of the blame, analysts say. But so do its predecessors, as well as municipalities (some run by the opposition), developers and planners. “This is a perfect crime,” says Murat Guvenc, an urban planner and academic. “Everybody has their finger in the pie.”

Turkey has strict building codes, adopted in the wake of an earthquake that killed 18,000 people on the outskirts of Istanbul in 1999 and updated five years ago. Under an urban-renewal scheme thought up by Mr Erdogan’s government, more than 3m housing units have been renewed.

The problems lie in implementation and oversight. Building permits are easy to acquire and inspections are weak. Companies mandated by the government to carry them out are paid by the developers. Projects usually comply with government standards at the start of construction, but not by the end, says Mr Guvenc. As soon as the inspectors leave, developers reduce the amount or the quality of the iron they use or cut down on the number of stirrups, the steel loops that prevent beams and columns from buckling under pressure. They may even tack on an extra floor. Then they enter informal negotiations with local authorities. “A lot of money may end up changing hands,” says Mr Guvenc. “We are talking about corruption par excellence.”

This means the difference between life and death. In Osmaniye, as elsewhere, most of the collapsed buildings date back to before the 1999 earthquake. But scores of new ones, ostensibly constructed according to new standards, have also come down or suffered irreparable damage. Hundreds of people may be trapped under a luxury housing estate completed only a decade ago in Antakya, south of Osmaniye. The contractor responsible was arrested on February 11th while attempting to leave Turkey. In nearby Erzin county, however, not a single building collapsed. The local mayor and his predecessor told local media that they did not allow any illegal construction. Both used the same phrase: “My conscience is clear.”

Construction amnesties, which allow owners to register unlicensed properties or ones that violate building codes in exchange for a fine, have made a bad situation much worse. Mr Erdogan’s government passed several such amnesties, the latest in 2018, ahead of general elections. The opposition backed the move, because it was popular with voters. The government reaped the political dividends, while millions of property owners ended up paying into state coffers and assuming the risk. A year after the 2018 amnesty, Mr Erdogan appeared in Kahramanmaras, proudly announcing that the programme “had solved the problems” of 144,000 of the city’s residents. The agency in charge of the programme revealed that more than half of the country’s housing stock did not comply with building standards.

“Look,” says Mrs Sen, pointing to what remains of her old neighbourhood, “if these buildings which were legally built and approved by the municipality at the time collapsed, then how can the illegal ones survive?” Things need to change from the top down, says her husband. Politics will have to stay out of urban development and zoning plans, supervision will need to dramatically improve and the patronage networks connecting government officials and the construction sector will have to be broken up. “Otherwise,” he says, “ten years from now you’ll see the same scenes you see here somewhere else.” ■