Quake Was Last Straw for Cairo’s ‘Death Building’ : Egypt: The too-high structure became a temporary grave for 73 tenants. Code violations and bureaucratic inefficiency are common.

CAIRO —  When the first concrete was poured in 1979, it was only one of thousands of bland residential hulks that have sprouted up amid Egypt’s medieval domes and minarets: eight floors of apartments, a few shops underneath.

But the new tenants filed suit when the owner added a ninth floor, and the legal fights continued as the building in Cairo’s posh suburb of Heliopolis kept rising: 11 floors, 12, then 14. The utility police, trying to enforce the original building permit for only eight floors, ordered the additional stories vacated.

The ruling was suspended, reportedly at the request of a government official who lived in the building. But the court file grew, recording 14 different building violation cases in 1980 and 1981. A fine of more than $90,000 was imposed against the owner, who was also the subject of code violation cases for other buildings nearby. But when an officer arrived to collect it, according to the Cairo weekly magazine Rose el Youssef, the owner refused to pay.

“To whom would you like me to speak to finish this thing?” asked the owner, picking up the telephone. The officer left.

Now Cairo popularly refers to this mud-colored high-rise, which collapsed into a temporary grave for 73 of its residents after a 5.9 earthquake struck Egypt on Oct. 12, as the “Death Building.”

But it wasn’t the only one. Only as the final toll from the tragedy rolls in--550 dead, 6,000 injured, 507 schools destroyed or rendered unusable, 1,178 more schools substantially damaged, anywhere from 35,000 to 100,000 people left homeless--has the magnitude of the disaster, and Egypt’s tragic unreadiness for it, become apparent.

The traditional Muslim resignation that initially blamed the earthquake on an unpredictable God has given way to a growing public anger that 550 Egyptians had to die in the relatively moderate earthquake that God wrought.

The Cairo press is full of recriminations about substandard housing that wasn’t replaced, a powerful “cement Mafia” that used defective building materials and, more than anything else, the corruption and inefficiency in Egypt’s government bureaucracy that routinely overlooks code violations and prevented execution of all but 92 of the 1,176 court rulings issued against construction violators during the first nine months of this year.

“We will be doing ourselves an injustice if we blame fate,” the opposition daily newspaper El Wafd said. “Fate cannot be responsible for defective cement or for building permits issued by bribery. . . . Those innocent souls never imagined that the government could collude with thieves and deviants to kill them under the rubble.”

Now President Hosni Mubarak faces one of the most difficult crises of his administration as the government seeks to house thousands of increasingly restive homeless families, as aftershocks send new buildings tumbling almost daily, and as the government prepares for local council elections Tuesday in which Islamic fundamentalists seem certain to capitalize on the disaster in their bid to wrest power from the regime.

Complicating the recovery has been the toll of decades of restrictive rent-control laws from the era of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser--laws that leave tenants paying $5 or $10 a month for truly squalid buildings, many of which were collapsing at the rate of two to four a day even before the earthquake. Egypt’s minister for local administration admitted shortly after the quake that half a million houses in Cairo alone had been “on the verge of collapse.”

Making the situation worse are the tricks of landlords long prevented by rent-control laws from pulling down their old buildings and erecting lucrative new high-rises. Government officials say that, since the quake, scores have moved to declare their lightly damaged buildings uninhabitable and throw the tenants into the streets, prompting government officials 10 days after the quake to declare such activities a crime under Egypt’s emergency laws.

“The analogy is that we were caught as a student going to the exam without doing his homework,” Milad Hanna, former chairman of the Parliament’s housing committee, said of Egypt’s unpreparedness for the quake.

“In Egypt, we have for years been infringing on the factor of safety and what I call the factor of ‘thiefty,’ and this factor of ‘thiefty’ is getting to be a serious problem,” Hanna said.

“People don’t put cement in the proper specifications. The codes look after the design and the drawing, but when it comes to execution, there is only random control. It is really a social problem, because if the landowner is a friend to a minister or in good relations with the head of the housing department, he can get away with whatever infringements he desires. So you could say that what we have is a social and political collapse as much as a technical collapse.”

Adding to the public ire was the government’s slow response to the earthquake. Thousands were camping out in the streets and around mosques and parks before the army was called in to set up tent cities. The government moved to make thousands of vacant apartments available to the homeless, a rarity in disaster-relief operations.

But while nearly 4,000 families were quickly shuttled to the new flats in the first 10 days after the quake, many families complained that they were ignored when they tried to sign up. Others said they couldn’t get an engineer to verify that their house was destroyed or in some cases were forced to get a nod from Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party before gaining approval for a new house.

“The man told us, ‘You will have a flat in the morning,’ but he just put us here and left us,” said Amina Mohammed Hassan, who was camped out recently amid what was left of her household furnishings in the parking lot outside the new housing headquarters in Medinat Salaam.

“We’ve been here 10 days,” she said. “We have nothing.

“We need a house,” she said, her voice rising. “God, please help us and try to settle this by your power!”

Western diplomats say the government’s slow response added to the crisis. “I think for the first five or six days there was partial, if not almost total, paralysis, and I think the government is only now starting to get a grip on the scale of the problem,” one Western envoy said.

Moreover, foreign analysts say the government’s efforts to help the homeless have been diverted by the same bureaucracy that helped create the disaster.

“You have a tragedy which was mostly preventable and now is being made worse by further incompetence,” a Western diplomat said. “What we have seen is that the government is making it as difficult and stressful as possible for the victims. ‘Yes, your daughter died, but you must get two more signatures before you get any help.’ Only now are they beginning to do anything effective, and that’s mostly because the army has moved in. . . . I think the true miracle is that more people didn’t die, that we didn’t have five times as many dead and five times as much destruction.”

The response of the Egyptian citizenry was strong and immediate. As many as 100 people have been seen lined up around one blood bank, waiting to donate blood. The press has been full of stories of neighbors who pulled friends out of the rubble of collapsed buildings, hauled the injured to the hospitals and carried food and blankets to the homeless.

For most Egyptians, it seemed, the earthquake would eventually pass as another in a long line of troubles that must be endured.

“It’s bad, but not that bad. The Egyptians are taking it easily, because they have lived for 7,000 years in this country and they have seen many catastrophes,” said Mustafa Amin, one of Egypt’s most widely read columnists, in an interview. “They know the only buildings we have which will not fall are the pyramids and the Sphinx. Everything else is temporary.”