Türkiye and Syria earthquakes (2023)

On February 6, 2023, at 4:17 a.m. local time, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake strikes the Kahramanmaraş region in southern Türkiye, on the East Anatolian fault. Nine hours later, a second one, of magnitude 7.5, ruptures a neighboring fault. Eleven Turkish provinces are hit, with more than 50,000 dead in Türkiye and more than 6,000 in Syria, hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed or damaged. Damage reaches several tens of billions of dollars according to the World Bank, and over a hundred according to national assessments. Türkiye does, however, have a compulsory earthquake scheme since 2000, run by the public pool Turkish Catastrophe Insurance Pool, or TCIP (DASK), which insures homes up to a low cap and reinsures on the international market. More than half of urban homes are insured there, high for the region, but the sums insured are low. Insured losses, of the order of five to six billion dollars according to market estimates, fall mostly on the pool and on its reinsurers. For the market, the loss served as a test for Turkish seismic risk modeling, for the pool's zone-based pricing, and for the gap between replacement value and the sum insured. It also recalled the correlation between two events in a single night, which the hours clause deals with.