Turkey’s earthquakes show the deadly extent of construction scams

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. Mrs 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.”Mrs Sen’s husband, Mustafa, quit the construction sector years ago, and now grows olives and walnuts. Other contractors were undercutting his prices and ignoring building codes. “If we used 100 tonnes of iron in a building, they would use 90 tonnes,” he says. Osmaniye sits near . “I knew we were on the brink of catastrophe,” he says.