Assessment of urban seismic resilience of a town in Eastern Turkiye: Turkoglu, Kahramanmaras before and after 6 February 2023 M 7.8 Kahramanmaras earthquake

On 6 February 2023, two earthquakes occurred approximately 9 h apart, with Mw 7.8 and 7.5, and epicenters located in Pazarcık and Elbistan districts of Kahramanmaras province, respectively. As part of a national project team which was funded by the Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency of Turkiye (AFAD) between June 2021 and June 2023, the authors of this article had proposed a framework to assess the seismic resilience of an urban region. The pilot area of this national project was a small‐scale industrial town named Turkoglu located to the south of Kahramanmaras, at the intersection of Amanos and Pazarcik segments of the East Anatolian Fault zone. The proposed framework encompasses the assessment of active faults in the region, construction of regional velocity models, ground motion simulations of potential earthquakes, structural vulnerability, and study of seismic resilience indicators. The Pazarcik earthquake occurred 4 months before the end of the project on the exact fault system, which was modeled in ground motion simulations within the project in 2022. The objective of this article is multifold: first, to present our findings before the earthquake (2021–2022) in the region, including regional velocity models, ground motion simulations, street survey‐based building classifications, and vulnerability classes; and second, to compare the after‐event modeling of damage distributions in comparison with the observed damages as well as resilience evaluations of the region from multiple perspectives. A third objective is to assess the seismic resilience framework used in the project, as there are multiple seismically active areas in Turkiye and the world where similar large events are anticipated. This study constitutes a significant case study in the Turkoglu region, which involves critical evaluations of seismic resilience from before and after event data.