Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

An aerial view of destroyed buildings in Hatay, Turkey. (Image: Getty)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023

When the quake hit, the apartment block in Osmaniye, where Halise Sen had once lived, collapsed like a house of cards, burying her former neighbours under nine floors of concrete. 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.”Sen’s husband, Mustafa, quit the construction sector years ago, and now grows olives and...

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