After the recent events and the devastating earthquake that struck both Syria and Turkey, investors have developed a justified fear of the safety and security of investing in Turkey.
So in this article we will explain to investors about the law of earthquake insurance in Turkey and about the technology of earthquake-resistant buildings and it’s connection to the smart city of ” Yenişehir” located on the banks of the new Canal Istanbul.
Earthquake resistant buildings
The buildings have rules and specifications that consider safety and surrounding conditions, and following these rules means providing the buildings with technologies that help to extinguish the magnitude of the earthquake and protect the building from falling and thus protect the lives of its residents.
So what are the specifications of earthquake-resistant buildings? And how do engineers work to strengthen and design them in a way that makes them resilient to tremors and aftershocks?
We can summarize the properties of earthquake-resistant buildings within three main ideas:
Flexibility
There are two main levels of flexibility that engineers seek to ensure:
The first level
is the one necessary to withstand less powerful earthquakes, the kind that can strike any building 3 or 4 times during its life span.
At this level, construction engineers aim to prevent any damage that needs to be repaired in the building due to these low-magnitude earthquakes, which means that it should be well-designed in a way that enables the building to face any of these quakes without being damaged.
The second level
is needed to cope with high-magnitude earthquakes, which are fewer in number and less likely to occur than the previous type.
Durability
Is to modify and adjust the resistance and resilience of individual structural elements, or the structural elements as a whole, in order to improve the performance of the building against presumed earthquakes, and reinforcement often includes increasing the resistance of individual elements or their malleability or adding new structural elements to increase the resistance of the building to lateral forces well.
Rebar is considered the most powerful material in construction, and is used to arm concrete buildings using high-resistance steel rods, available in diameters between 6 mm to 40 mm and more.
Iron is used due to its high resistance to pressure and tensile forces with the same efficiency, and is one of the most important malleable materials, which helps to achieve higher malleability in concrete buildings, by its ability to contain higher loads without a sudden collapse.
But the ways to make the building resilient enough to withstand earthquakes are not limited to the use of complex means aimed at absorbing seismic energy and reducing the force of tremors, but there are other methods concerned with the interior and exterior design of the building and its body as well.
Ideally, the building should be as regular and consistent as possible, and if all floors are not at the same height and the columns are grid-shaped with equal distances, then the building’s resilience to an earthquake increases.
Anti-earthquake techniques
Techniques used in earthquake resistant buildings include:
- Isolated base technology
It consists in the use of rubber bases of a certain thickness, placed under the concrete foundations of the building, and its flexibility helps to absorb and suppress the energy of earthquakes. This method is widely used in Japan, where 9000 buildings use it.
2. Mass damper technique
This technique uses a heavy swinging mass (made of steel) that acts as a central pendulum designed to swing against the bending caused by an earthquake in buildings to balance the impact of the earthquake.
Sometimes the mass is designed by a fluid that moves in the same way as the pendulum (against the bending) to reverse the impact of an earthquake.
3. Structural reinforcement
Engineers and designers have different ways to strengthen the structure of the building against potential earthquakes, leading to the discharge and redirection of seismic forces.
4. Construction with soft materials
High-softness materials can absorb large amounts of energy without crashing, bricks and concrete are considered low-softness materials, but materials such as modified steel and creatively reinforced concrete with fiber can provide similar softness.
5. Strengthening the foundations
Creating a flexible foundation for a building can help it to stay standing during an earthquake, by building a foundation made of reinforced concrete and cross strips on top of a sand cushion.
Earthquake insurance in Turkey
Earthquake insurance in Turkey is one of the most mandatory things in Turkey, where the earthquake insurance policy (Dask) became one of the documents necessary to complete the process of buying and selling after the great earthquake that occurred in 1999, destroying buildings and killing thousands of people.
This document is issued by the Turkish Disaster Insurance Institute and guarantees Turkish and foreign investors their material and moral rights, as well as forcing construction institutions to commit to the required standards to ensure the safety of construction and its resistance to earthquakes
But in case of an earthquake happening , God forbid, and if the building is destroyed, the Turkish government will take care to house all those affected and compensate them financially and morally, in addition to inspecting the damaged property and studying how to rebuild it again.
It is worth mentioning that Turkey is one of the first countries to adopt advanced requirements in the field of earthquake safety, and Sabiha Gökçen International Airport, one of the main airports serving Istanbul is one of the most earthquake-resistant buildings in the world, and is one of the two international airports in Istanbul located near the North Anatolia crack.
But one might ask: How then did all these buildings be destroyed after the earthquake in Syria and Turkey? The answer is simple because 98% of these buildings were built before 1999, according to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
However, all the buildings created by the Turkish Collective Housing Authority “Toki” remained resilient to the earthquake because of the adoption of earthquake resistance standards in all those buildings.
Yenişehir an entire earthquake resistance city
We mentioned in previous articles that one of the most important features of “Yenişehir” that it will be resistant to earthquakes as the Turkish government did not lose sight of this topic even two years before the devastating earthquake.
The projects in Yenişehir are divided into two sections:
- Government projects
It is supervised by the government itself, such as the collective housing and the conference hall. Through the company Toki, which gained the confidence of the citizens after the withstanding of its 133759 buildings divided between the ten states affected by the earthquake.
- Special projects
It is under the supervision of the municipality by ensuring that the construction company that oversees the construction process follows the standards approved by the government to maintain the safety of the building and make it resistant to earthquakes by studying the site and the most suitable technology, not to mention the earthquake insurance policy, which without the buying and selling process is not complete.
Therefore, we at Elhaj Real Estate Group reassure our customers that the Canal Istanbul project was and will remain an exceptional project that keeps pace with all the standards of modernity and progress, and investing in it is a profitable and safe investment
المصدر الجزيرة نت
#يني_شهير
#زلزال_تركيا
#elhaj_group
Read more: Earthquake-resistant Yenisehir