October 2011, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
It is clear that the heavy damage is due to structural deficiencies. It is not a matter of poor material quality, which is practically everywhere except, perhaps, in buildings built in the last 2-3 years some of which were also damaged.
The area has seen a boom in building construction in the last decade, and it is obvious that they had pushed beyond the limits of conventional practice into the realm of improperly engineered and structurally flawed designs. The mistakes are fundamental and obvious. The typical mistakes are soft story, torsion, inadequate lateral strength. Captive column mistake also exists, but at much lesser scale compared to elsewhere in Turkey.
Here is a typical mid-rise building constructed recently (this one is from 2011):
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| Figure 1. Typical mid-rise with soft ground story, in Ercis. |
Another example of flawed design: the U-shaped RC structural wall around the elevator shaft took a major blow. The ground story has a split level, starting at the elevator shaft.
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| Figure 2. Split level tall ground story, in Ercis. |
