Damage Assessment of Structures Following the February 6, 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes: A Dataset-Based Case Study in Gaziantep, Türkiye

Following the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes (M_w 7.7 and 7.6) that struck Türkiye on February 6, 2023, the Ministry of Environment, Urbanization, and Climate Change (MoEUCC) initiated a large-scale post-earthquake damage assessment campaign, targeting more than 2,3 million structures within the affected region. A comprehensive field survey was carried out in and around Gaziantep, one of the most severely affected cities. The authors assessed more than 1700 structures representing a wide range of occupancy types, including residential, educational, healthcare, religious, administrative, industrial, and lodging structures. In this paper, the methodological process of post-earthquake data collection in and around Gaziantep is presented, together with the data on the distribution of damage with respect to construction period, number of stories, and building occupancy type, to ensure a complete understanding of the extent and characteristics of structural damage. The damage assessment employed two data sources: (i) the data gathered through the authors’ newly developed, novel damage-assessment software, presented here for the first time, and (ii) the official post-earthquake damage database of the MoEUCC. A further novelty of this study is the presentation of the largest dataset to date for the investigated earthquake doublet, encompassing approximately 1700 buildings. Additionally, the relationship between damage states, peak ground accelerations, and fault distances is thoroughly investigated. The detailed earthquake-hit site investigations revealed that the examined structures displayed structural inadequacies akin to those witnessed in previous seismic events, with a notable focus on the arrangement of the structural system, the quality of construction materials and reinforcement detailing.