Organizational and building recovery from the 2023 Kahramanmaraş, Türkiye Earthquake Sequence

This report summarizes the preliminary observations of an interdisciplinary reconnaissance team that traveled to selected regions of Türkiye to document recovery approximately 20 months after the devastating Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence that struck southeast Türkiye and northern Syria on February 6, 2023. The team, jointly funded by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) program and the Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER), comprised engineering and social sciences researchers from the United States, Canada, and Türkiye. Several members of the team had participated in previous deployments to Türkiye in the initial weeks and months after the earthquake, including a multi-phase collaborative deployment of EERI-LFE and Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) researchers from February 12 through April 1, 2023 (EERI and GEER, 2023) and a Quick Response deployment of SSEER researchers, March 4 - 12, 2023 (Comfort, Celik, and Erkan, 2024). The EERI-SSEER team spent 5 days in the field (from October 14-18, 2024), starting with one initial day in the capital city, Ankara, meeting with leadership at various government departments and civil society organizations. Following this, the joint team traveled to Gaziantep, Adıyaman, Gölbaşı, Kahramanmaraş, Kirikhan, Antakya, and Defne, many of the same cities and villages visited by previous EERI and SSEER teams. This was intentional, as the main goals of the deployment were to revisit damaged buildings and re-interview key members of government, business, and community organizations to document recovery progress over the past 20 months, as well as understand the factors that facilitated or impeded recovery. The team focused primarily on the recovery of housing and, to a lesser extent, businesses and education, as these areas were considered foundational for communities to regain their capacity to meet daily needs. The EERI-SSEER deployment presented a unique opportunity to expand upon the initial snapshot of earthquake impacts captured by the EERI and SSEER teams that visited Türkiye in March 2023. Follow-up reconnaissance trips are imperative to maximize resilience learning, as some earthquake impacts can take months to reveal themselves and recovery efforts can stretch several years or even decades. These observations require a “longitudinal” reconnaissance approach – one that involves deploying resources repeatedly over time to more holistically document the recovery process and highlight important lessons. Given the extent and severity of its impacts, the 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence serves as an important opportunity to advance our understanding of what makes communities resilient in the face of unprecedented destruction, as briefly summarized in the next section.