In August 1999, I stood in the ruins of a collapsed apartment building near Izmit, Turkey—one of 60,000 buildings destroyed in 40 seconds by the most powerful earthquake to strike a major city in nearly a century. It was a modern building surrounded by trees and greenery. A couch and a table stood intact in a room bright with potted flowers, now open to the air. A woman's coat had been carefully draped over the remains of a wall. As the stench of death rose around us, I wondered if the coat's owner was buried in the rubble beneath my feet. I was sent to Turkey to chase the science—to bring home lessons for readers who live near a strikingly similar fault system in California. But as I surveyed the damage with a team of scientists and engineers, there was no separating the science from the politics. Covered with a fine film of sweat mixed with dust from crumbled buildings and lime that had been scattered to prevent the spread of disease, we saw firsthand how corruption and greed had conspired with the forces of nature to kill more than 17,000 people. Some buildings were constructed right on the North Anatolian Fault. Its mole-like tracks plowed through barracks that had collapsed on 120 military officers, a highway overpass that fell on a bus, a bridge whose failure cut off access and aid to four villages. Researchers found concrete that was crumbly with seashells, chunks of Styrofoam where reinforcing metal bars should have been. Yet some well-reinforced buildings nicked or even pierced by the fault came through just fine, including an apartment building that moved 10 feet and had its front steps sliced off. Another home was cut in two; half collapsed, the other survived with windows intact. “How the hell?” marveled one engineer. “There's no way that building should stand in an earthquake.” That blend of science, politics, and human nature is just part of what makes earth science so compelling. It goes far beyond the academics of geology and plate tectonics to embrace earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, landslides—natural hazards that affect thousands of people and change the course of civilization.
Probabilistic seismic hazard maps for the North Balkan region