Earthquake fears loom large in Istanbul’s mayoral race

MELIH OZUNAL and his neighbours had reason to worry about the state of their apartment block in Goztepe, on Istanbul’s Asian shore. They had long known that the cement used in their building, which dates back to the late 1980s, had been made from corrosive sand dredged from the bottom of the Marmara Sea. But last year, after he discovered that the contractor had used 16-millimetre iron rebars instead of the 18mm ones mentioned in the original plans, Mr Ozunal, an architect, asked the local authorities to check the building’s earthquake resilience. “Everyone here is anxious,” he says, as inspectors use a hammer to test the concrete in one of the columns. “We may need to have the building torn down and replaced.”Concerns over the state of Istanbul’s ageing housing stock have mounted since last year, when a killed more than 53,000 people in southern Turkey. The city of 16m people is bracing for a similar disaster. Leading seismologists put the probability of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake striking the region before 2030 at over 60%. Europe’s biggest city is not ready. Istanbul’s infrastructure is in reasonably good shape, but its buildings are not; the majority are not up to the required code.