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9 Feb 2023

‘Bad buildings killed people not the earthquake’, Turkish construction boss says

Among the many questions about the scale of deaths in this disaster is why some buildings collapsed when they were surrounded by others that didn’t?

Once again Turkey is facing anger about whether regulations to make blocks of flats withstand earthquakes were followed by builders and checked by the authorities.

We met civil engineer Ramazan Yildirim whose construction company built many of the buildings here in Adana to try to understand what’s gone wrong and whether deaths in cities like this – more than a hundred miles from the epicentre of the earthquake – could have been avoided.