Dilay Gürsoy
18.08.2022 – With a sense of unity, towards safer and healthier days…
Just as none of the living beings in the world can choose to come into existence, they likewise cannot determine the natural end of their life process; yet throughout their lifetime they deserve to live safely through the most fundamental right we call the ‘right to life’, and in order to lead a safe life they must know and exercise the rights they possess.
The right to life is one of humanity’s most important fundamental rights and is defined among the fundamental aims and duties of the State in our country’s Constitution. Following the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, our country accepted and announced that all individuals have the right to a safe life with the statement, ‘Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.’ In addition, in our religion, which frames the matter of fundamental rights with definitive provisions, and in our holy book the Qur’an, verses concerning the safeguarding of life and the protection of human life can be clearly seen.
I would like to remind everyone that we owe to science, and to the efforts made on the path of science, all the developments that we have today which make our lives easier, enable us to plan our lives, and allow us to use at a higher level our intelligence, which is our most important characteristic distinguishing us from other living beings. The duty of us engineers, who have been trained through the opportunities provided by our country and our Republic, is to produce practical knowledge along the path opened by science, to apply it, and to supervise it, so that the world’s ecosystem can be sustained.
It is difficult to put the pain a person experiences into words; it is far easier to take the necessary precautions before experiencing that pain, as all of us learned in the earthquake of 17 August 1999. With the authority granted to us by our State’s constitution, in order to secure the right to life in connection with preventing the destructive effects of disasters, and of earthquakes in particular, it has become essential both to design and implement new projects and to prepare risk mitigation plans for all areas at risk, with the inclusion of Building Inspection Engineers belonging to the relevant discipline.
It is evident that the level of awareness has increased thanks to the ease of access to information brought by technology. It is necessary to illuminate this awareness with accurate information, to develop various disaster-prevention projects, to establish civil society movements concerning their implementation, and to create long-term plans with definite objectives through a correct awareness-raising policy.
Structures that continue to be inhabited even though we can foresee, as a result of risk assessment, that the buildings will prove to be at risk; urban regional plans and zoning plans approved without sufficient infrastructural research; contractors who reject inspection despite the definitive provisions of the Building Inspection legislation; and engineers who have lost their professional ethics — all of these not only usurp the right to life of all humanity but also increasingly lower our country’s level of prosperity day by day. Since I know that we are a country that knows how to live with its emotions, I believe that if we remember that the people whose rights we usurp are our own family, and that the place we turn into disaster is our own country, we can gradually overcome all these problems.
I commemorate with mercy those we lost in the earthquake of 17 August 1999, and I sincerely wish that it will never be repeated. As the Building Inspection and Earthquake Engineering Association, just as we will consider it our duty to take part in all civil society movements concerning the prevention of the effects of disasters and the struggle against disasters, I would also like to announce through this article that in the days ahead the necessary procedures for putting our own projects into operation will be initiated.
‘With a sense of unity, towards safer and healthier days…’
Dilay GÜRSOY- Civil Engineer
YDDMD Secretary General
