The Turkish Experience – Resilience in an industrializing country through FRP strengthening

In Türkiye, a remarkable portion of existing buildings, particularly those built before 2000s, do not comply with the provisions of current and previous earthquake-resistant design codes. This unfortunately results with huge loss of lives and built environment after severe seismic events as recently demonstrated by the February 2023 earthquakes, which caused more than 53.000 casualties and heavy damage or collapse of over 260.000 buildings. Since the country experiences severe earthquakes quite frequently and the probability of an earthquake with an approximate magnitude of 7.0-7.5 is quite high in coming years for the heart of the country, Istanbul, urgent intervention is needed to the existing sub-standard buildings to avoid catastrophic consequences. Fiber reinforced polymers offer rapid, occupant-friendly and effective solutions for seismic improvement of substandard buildings with competitive costs. In this study, the research conducted in Türkiye for last 20+ years on seismic retrofit of sub-standard structural members/structures is outlined and potential gains that can be obtained through FRP-strengthening are anticipated in terms of prevention of future losses. Furthermore, concepts of “incremental” and “deficiency- based” seismic retrofit are discussed in terms of avoidance of total collapse of existing sub-standard buildings and in terms of costs and benefits.