Daños estructurales producidos por el terremoto de Kocaeli, Turquía, del 17 de agosto de 1999

Structural damages produced by che Kocaeli earthquake, Turkey, August, 17 1999

The Kocaeli earthquake, occurred recently in Turkey, produced one of the most severe natural desasters of the XXth century. A preliminary conclusion can be drawn that this earthquake mostly damaged structures built in the last twenty years along a prosperous industrial and turistic area extending 15 km on both sides of the Anatolian seismic fault. Thousands of buildings with four to eight stories collapsed, causing the death of a still unknown number of persons, which could exceed 30.000. The most damaged urban centers were Yalova, Golciik and Adapazan. In this last one, soil liquefaction occurred in an extensive area, having as a consequence that numerous buildings sank, tilted or overturned. But most of the buildings were damaged due to deficiencies in the construction practice (careless structural configuration, inadequate material quality, inappropriate detailing of the reinforcement), together with the lack of control. Although Turkey has since many decades ago building codes internationally recognized for their technical progress, the size of the columns and beams of the dammaged structures was insufficient and the greater part of the structural systems was not adequate for seismic areas. The fragile and sudden collapse of many of the buildings in the area shows that the existence of good seismic codes is not a guarantee of structural safety, if the code is not applied with professional ethics, fact wich occurs in many places in the world.