JOURNAL OF PERFORMANCE OF CONSTRUCTED FACILITIES, cilt.29, sa.6, 2015 (SCI-Expanded)
The structural performance evaluation of 90 Reinforced Concrete (RC) buildings collapsed during October 23 (Erciş) and November 9 (Edremit), 2011 Van, Turkey, Earthquakes is presented in this paper. A total of 35000 buildings are damaged or collapsed in the city center and surrounding villages after Erciş and Edremit earthquakes. Almost all the reinforced concrete buildings are affected in the region. To evaluate the structural performance of the collapsed buildings, the buildings are evaluated in sub-titles such as structural system properties, specification properties, material properties (concrete and reinforcement steel properties), and soil properties. At the end of the study, it can be seen that a large proportion of non-engineering reinforced concrete buildings completely collapsed or damaged heavily. Most of the reinforced concrete buildings in the affected area are not designed and constructed in accordance with Turkish Earthquake Resistant Design Code. Also, it is emerged that the 26% of the buildings don’t have a building licence, the 66% of the buildings’ ground floor used as a commercial or retail space, the 36% of the buildings don’t have any structural design, building (static) projects of the 57% of the structures insufficient, the 57% of the buildings is not construct in accordance with their structural drawings, the 74% of the structural drawings don’t have any detail drawings and beam/column confined zones, the concrete used in many building did not have adequate compressive strength, aggregate dimensions are larger than maximum aggregate diameter for concrete, the 60% of the building constructed with using un-ribbed reinforcement steel, and the majority of the buildings (85%) don’t have got any geotechnical report.