The Broken Pier of Datça

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Friday 08 August, 2014 by Uncle Spike

As part of the ‘Guess What!‘ series, readers were challenged to work out what the story was behind this photograph of some reinforced concrete…

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There were some good guesses, and two of our Spikette’s (Annette and Liz) followed a hot trail of deductive logic to more or less get the story behind the image. Some of the theory was as follows:

A broken path.

Cracked but quite a thick slab so something really heavy broke it or there was a shift in the ground.

Part of a bridge?

Is this object/structure in Turkey?

An earthquake or the land dried out and the path has moved.

There’s a dip in it so this is a join. Or a collapse where the path/bridge has been undermined and repaired.

It’s a concrete pathway of sorts. So it’s crossing something. Maybe a water channel. So they are slabs that form a bridge maybe.

The image strip is very narrow so whatever is above/below must be a massive clue.

So it’s an earthquake damaged modern structure.

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Ok, to add some context…

Now you can see how accurate the girls were, well done 😀

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It’s a section of damaged pier on the Datça Peninsula, southwest Turkey.

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Bizarre thing is that it’s just a section that collapsed, the rest is intact.

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I suspect this was caused by 3 quakes in quick succession, August 2004.

Not huge for around here (5.4-5.6), but epicentre within 5km (3 mi). 

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The 5 story “Oğretmen Evi” (Teachers House) hotel was critically damaged then too (just 200 metres from the pier) and was demolished just this past winter. We were there the day they started the wrecking, much to the delight of Cousin Spike Jnr – who shares his dad’s typical boyhood love of all things to do with destruction.

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