Interviewed by SIC Notícias this Monday, Mário Lopes, in a parallel between Portugal and Turkey, reports that“most of Lisbon would be equal to Turkey.
According to the engineer, “in Portugal there’s everything [buildings] – good and bad – and, sometimes, some next to others and you can’t see the differences”.
The catastrophes that come from earthquakes “don’t have to do with the fact that the buildings don’t resist”, but rather that the construction isn’t solid enough to resist”. “The problem is what is not done. To save money things are done badly,” he pointed out.
“In our country there’s no systematic inspection of compliance with the rules, and many times it’s even done by the owners of the construction site”, he said, blaming “incompetence and corruption” between the regulation “which forces things to be done well and the final houses where people live”.
Mário Lopes maintains that these aspects lead to “the constructions having much less resistance than they should have according to the regulations”.
“This will exist in every country in the world, so it depends a bit on the honesty and competence of the people involved in the construction process,” he concluded.
More than 3,500 people died today after an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale and aftershocks that hit southern Turkey and northern Syria, according to a provisional assessment by local authorities.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS) the quake that occurred today registered a magnitude of 7.8 and dozens of aftershocks were felt.
The earthquake occurred at 04:17 (01:17 in Lisbon), 33 kilometers from the capital of the province of Gaziantep, in southeastern Turkey and near the border with Syria, at a depth of 17.9 kilometers.
The quake struck southeastern Turkey and Syria and is considered the largest since 1939. The 7.8 magnitude quake was also felt in Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel and Jordan.
