Izmit Earthquake 1999

After a long day at work, you eat dinner and retire to bed to do the same thing the next day. But what if tomorrow did not come? What if a natural disaster happened while you were sleeping? The house collapses, fire erupts, the town floods. Any of these things are possible. Do people ever really plan for them though? The common thought process is that that will never happen to me, not here. There is no guarantee in that though, and the people of Izmit Turkey figured this out the hard way. It took a high number of fatalities for the people of Turkey to realize that the Anatolian may be even more dangerous than they thought. To be accurate, every fault line is dangerous, but it was over looked at how powerful the earthquakes that the Anatolian fault produced. So what is the history of the fault? Where did other earthquakes happen? How many people died? Is there another earthquake on the horizon? Well I am glad you asked. The country of Turkey lies on the Anatolian Plate. The fault is a strike-slip fault much like the commonly known San Andreas Fault in the United States. The Anatolian fault is almost as active as the San Andreas, and is very well known for the size of the earthquakes that it produces. From “1939 to 1999, Turkey had 11 earthquakes all over 6.0 magnitude on the Richter scale” (“1999 Izmit, Turkey Earthquake”). It was also compared to the San Andreas Fault because one earthquake eventually led to another earthquake, or also known as Earthquake Storms. Although predicting when these earthquakes will happen is almost impossible, at least at the moment, seismologists could predict where the next earthquake would happen based on the stress transfer that was produced by the original earthquake. Seismologists have predicted that “an earthquake will happen on the Anatolian fault line around the city of Istanbul, and it will be extremely destructive and harmful” (movie). An explanation as to why the Anatolian plate is so active is because it is being

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