Lessons Learned from the 2023 Türkiye Earthquakes: Buildings, Governance, and the Digital Dimension of Resilience

In the early hours of 6 February 2023, an earthquake of moment magnitude Mw 7.7 ruptured near Pazarcık in Kahramanmaraş province at 04:17 local time. Roughly nine hours later, a second event of Mw 7.6 struck near Elbistan. This unprecedented seismic doublet caused a complex multi-fault rupture along the East Anatolian Fault system, with surface faulting extending hundreds of kilometres across an area of approximately 120,000 km², directly impacting some 14 million people.

A convergent finding across the academic literature is that the catastrophic outcome was completely preconditioned. The tectonic hazards of the East Anatolian Fault system were thoroughly documented; what failed was a matching investment in regional preparedness, severely undermined by exposure and weak enforcement mechanisms (Hussain et al., 2023).

This analytical position forms the core pillar of the co-authored Journal of Risk Research study, which reframes the entire catastrophe around four pivotal strands: structural vulnerabilities in domestic housing and critical health facilities; operational execution under harsh winter constraints and cascading aftershocks; centralized command and communication gridlocks during the golden 72-hour rescue window; and the structural limitations of national disaster-risk frameworks (Teker, Bilgin & Yildiz, 2026). The inquiry shifts from the inevitability of the hazard to an audit of an accumulated, generational "resilience debt."

The structural record proves that the killer was not the seismic event alone, but the widespread frailty of buildings that failed to protect their occupants (Teker, Bilgin & Yildiz, 2026).

Post-disaster forensic engineering reports systematically identified the same reinforced-concrete failure modes: weak/soft storeys (typically ground floors altered for commercial use), strong-beam/weak-column detailing anomalies, short-column configurations, missing transverse reinforcement, and compromised material mixtures (Yön et al., 2024; Demir et al., 2024; Tunç, Mertol & Akış, 2024). Advanced structural modeling indicates that hundreds of buildings were subjected to vertical seismic components that completely overmatched design standards (Oz & Omur, 2025; Morales-Beltran, 2025).

While pre-1999 buildings suffered expectedly high failure rates due to lax historical oversight (Hansu & Oğuz, 2025), the most critical revelation is that newer stock fell as well. Nominal compliance on paper failed in practice: modern high-rise blocks and precast structures collapsed abruptly due to fragile connection detailing and uncalculated infill-wall interactions (Avcil, 2023; Aras et al., 2025).

The city of Erzin (Hatay) offers strong evidence that destruction is not a fatalistic certainty. Despite undergoing intense regional shaking, Erzin recorded zero building collapses due to historical, uncompromised local enforcement of construction regulations (Reckford & Miyamoto, 2023). This aligns with global history: Japan's 1995 Kobe earthquake proved that 95% of building failures occurred in structures predating the 1981 code overhaul, and the engineered high-rises during the 2011 Tōhoku event successfully withstood massive shaking, proving that rigorous administrative enforcement translates directly into preserved lives (Teker et al., 2026).

Following the 1999 Marmara disaster, Türkiye established a comprehensive theoretical framework: updating building codes, centralizing command under AFAD, and launching the National Earthquake Strategy (UDSEP-2023) (Teker et al., 2026). However, the immense multi-provincial footprint of the 2023 doublet under freezing winter conditions severely overmatched these centralized plans. The structural toll on public healthcare was immediate: 20 hospitals sustained severe damage (13 Ministry of Health facilities, 1 university hospital, 6 private institutions), alongside the destruction or disabling of 243 primary-care facilities, forcing immediate emergency transitions into ad-hoc tent and container clinics (SBB, 2025; Teker et al., 2026).

A key lesson of the 2023 sequence is that critical transport lifelines were built on equally fragile ground. Siting emergency asset entryways on active faults or liquefiable soils is a major planning failure. For example, Hatay Airport's runway was knocked out of service for six critical days due to fault ruptures and severe liquefaction displacements of 30–40 cm (Çetin et al., 2024; Papadopoulos et al., 2023). The Port of İskenderun, vital for incoming heavy rescue equipment, was paralyzed by massive wharf damage and a structural fire, while major arterial roads and pipelines were severed where they intersected fault traces (ASCE, 2026).

The affected region spanned approximately 160 municipalities. While local administrations are theoretically integrated into risk reduction via Provincial Disaster Risk-Reduction Plans (İRAP), the official SBB assessment explicitly calls for a systemic overhaul based on cross-stakeholder cooperation (SBB, 2025). This stands as an institutional admission that local tier municipal budgets, emergency equipment stocks, and trained personnel require profound structural empowerment to function effectively before central government mechanisms can organize and deploy.

The digital dimension represents the most forward-looking component of modern disaster risk reduction (DRR), yet the 2023 deployment highlighted sharp contradictions between infrastructure resilience and information policy.

Modern EEW networks can transmit vital seconds of warning via cellular interfaces to automate critical shut-offs (halting rapid transit systems, pausing gas pipelines, or opening elevator doors) (Teker et al., 2026). Yet, for an earthquake doublet whose lethality was completely dictated by structural failure, no digital notification layer could compensate for decades of construction negligence. Early warning must be leveraged as an operational complement, never an alternative to structural physics.

Amidst 33,000 relentless aftershocks, information integrity transformed into a life-safety requirement. While the Presidency Communications Directorate attempted to counter panic through regular disinformation bulletins (DMM, 2023), the operational record reveals a complex dynamic: the temporary restriction of major civilian social-media platforms during the initial response window severely degraded volunteer coordination and cut off active location feeds routed by trapped survivors (Comfort et al., 2025). True risk governance requires a dual commitment: neutralizing false alerts while actively preserving uninhibited access to the open digital channels that civilian search ecosystems rely upon during crises.

Standardized logistical response templates frequently fail vulnerable sub-populations whose specific needs require dedicated integration into pre-disaster planning:

The data compiled from independent scholarship and institutional studies confirms a reality: the catastrophic toll of February 2023 was not an inevitable outcome (Teker, Bilgin & Yildiz, 2026). Turning these insights into an active framework requires immediate transformation across five core policies: