ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Aymur Turanoglu picked up a piece of rubble from a wall in the seven-story apartment building that used to be her family's home. She poked at it, and dust flew off. She dropped it, and it broke into pieces.
"It was all sand!" she cried angrily, before turning away in tears.Rural Turks by the millions have poured into Istanbul looking for work in recent years, enabling contractors to make a killing by throwing up slapdash, concrete-and-cinderblock apartment blocks to house them.
When a powerful earthquake hit Tuesday, many of the cheaply made, never-inspected housing blocks pancaked into the ground, crushing thousands as they slept.
"Murderers!" the Hurriyet newspaper proclaimed Wednesday above a picture of a lifeless young woman half-buried in rubble.
Although the region has suffered several quakes over the past decade, experts say little has been done to address the problems of shady contractors who don't bother with permits and skimp on materials, or corrupt officials who don't enforce building codes.
In the wake of the worst temblor ever recorded in western Turkey, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit promised a crackdown on unscrupulous builders.
"The price for irresponsible behavior is very high for our people," he said. "We shall take measures against it."
But others complained that the powerful construction lobby and a corruption-riddled political system hinder reforms.
"They said the same last year" after a quake in Adana killed 144 people, said Feray Salman of the Turkish Association of Engineers and Architects. "And two years ago and 10 years ago. But the necessary measures are not taken."
"No one learned a lesson from the bitter experiences of the past," said Ali Sinan, head of the architecture department at Selcuk University in the central city of Konya. "I hope they learn from this one."
Any change will come too late for the Turanoglu family, which lost a 16-year-old daughter and their world in the doomsday quake.
"We woke up to shaking, then I saw the building collapse around me," said Turanoglu, a 35-year-old mother of four as she wearily picked through the remains of their belongings.
Across the street, rescue crews were still picking through the crumbled concrete and twisted pipes of their collapsed apartment house.
At least 23 people died in that one building.
They were all among the waves of rural Turks who have swollen Istanbul's population from about 1 million in 1960 to an estimated 12 million today.
The uncontrolled influx overwhelmed Istanbul and gave rise to neighborhoods of shanties built illegally on the fringes of the city -- known derisively in Turkish as "gecekondu," or "built overnight."
Today, these areas stretch for miles. But in recent years, many of the shacks have been haphazardly replaced by cookie-cutter apartment blocks, poorly constructed without building permits but affordable to those employed in nearby factories.