Of course, those arrested must be considered innocent until proven guilty, and their cases must be adjudicated promptly and fairly. Nonetheless, any review of damage caused by earthquakes around the world yields the unmistakable conclusion that most of the damage is caused not be the earthquake but by poor construction of impacted structures.
Most countries have laws and regulation to ensure that buildings are built to a code that makes them safe in geological or weather related disasters. At the same time, scrupulous or greedy builders find ways to circumvent those laws or regulations. These could be builders, contractors, suppliers or a combination of them. They could be regulators who are not doing their job, not always because they don't know how to do it. Sometime, they might just not do the job they know how to do, or look the other way for nefarious reasons, or just be amenable to a little or a lot of bribe.
We don't know what the crackdown in Turkey will bring. Will it be thorough and fair to all concerned? We do know that the loss of life is so great, the despair so deep, and the anger so boiling that nothing short of a true investigation and purpose-directed action, both penal and corrective, will suffice.
Turkey has an opportunity, unfortunate as it may be, to chart a new course to mitigating loss of life in natural disasters.
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