ULIZOS

Whaaaaaaaaat

She probably had an extremely poor diet / doesn’t drink water.

The news is starting. This is so fucking upsetting. Videos show Turkey's Erdogan boasted letting builders avoid earthquake codes ISTANBUL — As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan struggles to defend his response to last Monday's devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake, videos from a few years back have emerged showing him hailing some of the housing projects that crumbled, killing thousands of people. Critics say contractors were allowed to skip crucial safety regulations, increasing their profits but putting residents at risk. The videos have fueled public outrage over slow efforts to help residents in the aftermath of the massive earthquake — the world's deadliest in over a decade — that killed more than 35,000 people in Turkey and neighboring Syria, and left many injured and without a home, food or heating in the middle of winter. In one video, taken during a campaign stop ahead of Turkey's March 2019 local elections, Erdogan listed some of his government's top achievements — including new housing for the city of Kahramanmaras, also known as Maras, near the epicenter of last week's quake. "We solved the problem of 144,156 citizens of Maras with zoning amnesty," Erdogan said, using his term for the construction amnesties handed out to allow contractors to ignore the safety codes that had been put on the books specifically to make apartment blocks, houses and office buildings more resistant to earthquakes. Engineers and architects say the lack of safety features designed to absorb the shock of earthquakes likely contributed to the soaring death toll. In another 2019 campaign stop, in southern Turkey's Hatay province, Erdogan was again eager to tout the housing his government was creating. "We have solved the problems of 205,000 citizens of Hatay with zoning peace," he said, using another name for the amnesties being used to facilitate construction practices that could leave buildings unable to withstand earthquakes. The videos were reported by Turkish news sites such as Duvar and Diken, and have circulated widely. Duvar cited a senior Istanbul city official, Bugra Gokce, who gave a breakdown of the tens of thousands of building amnesty certificates granted before the 2018 general election in 10 provinces struck by the earthquake. They included more than 40,000 amnesty certificates in the hard-hit Gaziantep province, the official said. The amnesty meant that some builders had to pay a fine but their construction projects could go forward if they didn't meet code restrictions, according to Turkish media reports.

That's not necessarily true. This type of devastation doesn't happen in Japan where there have been even more powerful earthquakes, even recently. As another example, there was a devastating earthquake in Mexico in 1985 and at the end of the day so, so, so many people died (5,000–45,000, nobody knows for sure because the government censored this data) because of obscene corruption at every level in the government. There was a horrifying earthquake in 2017 on the same exact day as the 1985 earthquake and there was comparatively little damage because the city has since taken building codes a lot more serious. The few buildings that did collapse were older buildings (before 1985) that were never reinforced / renovated.

This is horrific.

SLAY

"These people"

What a bunch of fucking losers. Get a life.