In front of a collapsed apartment block in the eastern Turkish city of Islahiye, a pile of rubble grows day by day. Rescue workers — most of them volunteers, many of them foreign — are depositing the bits and pieces of people’s lives that need to be removed to get to the bodies. Books, dresses, chairs, toy bikes. One apartment block has collapsed and spilled onto the street, blending with the pile of debris. Large-scale detritus — staircases, walls, columns, ceilings, floors — mingle with the more mundane. The wedding photos, the teddy bears.

A man named Mehmet Ali takes my hand. He is frantic — in a green camouflage jacket his eyes bulge from under the rim of a thick knit cap. He tries to tell me something, but his words are jumbled. “Columns,” he says. “Metal.” Where words fail, he gestures at the pile of rubble in front of us and then pulls me toward it. He gestures for me to squat down and look at the detritus.

Each column, more than a meter wide, is supported by just a few pieces of rebar — an average of six per square meter. Mehmet Ali reaches down and pulls off a piece of the column with his fingers. When he makes a fist, it crumbles in his hand.