Turkish building stock is commonly composed of reinforced concrete moment resisting frames. Recent earthquakes in Turkey resulted thousands of failed or heavily damaged residential houses and office buildings. In addition of the earthquake failures, reinforced concrete structures may also failed only under their own weight. There are several examples such as Hicret Apartment in Diyarbakir (1983), Zumrut Apartment in Konya, in central Anatolia, Huzur Apartment in Istanbul (2007). On February 2nd, 2004 a 9-story reinforced concrete building in Konya (Zumrut Apartment) collapsed leaving 92 people dead. The first author of the paper was governmentally charged about the investigation of the failure causes. Carrot samples were taken from the concrete columns and steel samples were obtained from the disaster area. The dimensions of the structural members were determined. The structure was modeled in three dimensional space and vertical collapse analyses were conducted. The one of the main cause of failure was determined as the creep of the concrete occurred in excessively loaded columns. The main reasons of the damages and failures were determined to be the insufficiency in material quality, mistakes made in load selection and the inappropriate load-carrying dimensions. The construction mistakes and not obeying the design drawings are the other flaws. In this paper detailed information about the structure, creep analyses and vertical collapse analyze results were depicted in understandable format.
