On September 7, 1999, at 2:56 in the afternoon, an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 struck with its epicentre beneath Mount Parnitha, about 20 kilometres northwest of central Athens. The official count of the dead was 143, with more than 1,600 injured and tens of thousands left homeless. It was the deadliest earthquake to hit Greece in two decades, and one of the costliest in the country's history.
A magnitude 6.0 is not by itself a catastrophic event, and this is the part that made the earthquake a scandal as well as a disaster. The shaking lasted fifteen seconds. The fault was shallow, at a depth of under 10 kilometres, and directly under a city of several million people. Buildings in the northern and western suburbs, many of them five- and six-storey concrete apartment blocks put up quickly during the building booms of the 1960s and 1970s, failed in ways that structural engineers had warned about for years: soft ground floors used for parking and shops, so the column supports gave way and the floors above came down.
Greece had a seismic code since 1959. The rules existed. They were not enforced. It was enforcement, and it was the enormous amount of construction done with poor materials, inadequate reinforcement and no inspection, in a country where the state had little capacity to police it. Engineers surveying the damage afterwards found that buildings near the epicentre in Ano Liosia and Menidi had collapsed while some much older structures in central Athens came through.
The response changed things. Rescue teams came from France, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Israel, and the Turkish team arrived within hours, which softened a stretch of Greek-Turkish relations that had been bad for years and contributed to the rapprochement of the following decade. At home the government set up a new organization for earthquake planning and protection, strengthened the code and its enforcement, and made earthquake insurance more common.
Within a year of the quake, construction permits in the highest-risk zones required stricter review, and the practice of leaving a weak ground floor in a concrete frame was specifically addressed. The damage bill was put at several billion dollars.