The role of the municipality in disaster planning: TAMP, İRAP, and the data to keep ready

Article 14 of Law No. 5393 on Municipalities lists fire-fighting, emergency aid, rescue and ambulance services among the municipality's duties. Under Article 53 of the Law, the municipality prepares the necessary disaster and emergency plans and readies teams and equipment, taking the characteristics of the locality into account, in order to protect against fire, industrial accidents, earthquakes and other natural disasters or to reduce the damage they cause. The same article requires these plans to be prepared in coordination with other emergency plans at the provincial level and the opinions of the relevant ministry, public institutions, professional organisations, universities and other local administrations to be obtained.

Article 7 of Law No. 5216 on Metropolitan Municipalities assigns the metropolitan municipality the duties of carrying out natural-disaster planning and preparations at the metropolitan scale in line with provincial-level plans, running fire-fighting and emergency aid services, and inspecting buildings for the measures to be taken against fire and other disasters.

AFAD's organisation and duties are today regulated in Articles 30 to 54 of Presidential Decree No. 4. Article 51 of the Decree requires that all data and inventory information produced by public institutions and usable at every stage of disaster management be shared with the Authority free of charge. Additional Article 1 of Law No. 5902 also requires metropolitan municipalities to spend at least one per mille of their most recent realised annual budget expenditure on disaster, emergency and civil defence investment projects approved by AFAD.

The Türkiye Afet Müdahale Planı (TAMP) sets out the basic principles of response planning before, during and after a disaster, and the responsibilities of the units that will take part in the response. The plan was first published in the Official Gazette of 3 January 2014; its current version was put into effect by Presidential Decision No. 6053, published in the Official Gazette of 15 September 2022.

The Regulation on Disaster and Emergency Response Services, which sets out the plan's implementation principles, was republished in the Official Gazette of 31 December 2025 and repealed the 2022 regulation. Under the new regulation, the response organisation is set up as four services: operations, information and planning, logistics and maintenance, and finance and administrative affairs. Disaster groups sit under these services; a lead solution partner is responsible for coordinating each group, and supporting solution partners take part in this work. Provisional Article 1 of the regulation requires the necessary changes to be made to TAMP within six months, and the existing plans to be applied until the new plan enters into force.

The municipality has a place at more than one point in this structure. The provincial disaster response plan is prepared under the chairmanship of the governor and the coordination of the provincial disaster and emergency management directorate, with the participation of the metropolitan or provincial mayor. The relevant municipality also prepares local-level disaster group plans, and the coordination of a disaster group at the local level may belong to the municipality. The disaster group manager is the most senior manager of the lead solution partner institution's provincial organisation or of the municipality. The metropolitan or provincial mayor is also a member of the İl Afet ve Acil Durum Koordinasyon Kurulu, which meets at least twice a year.

While response plans set out who does what at the moment of a disaster, İl Afet Risk Azaltma Planları (İRAP) identify actions aimed at reducing disaster risk in advance. According to AFAD, the work began in all provinces in January 2021, provinces completed their İRAP documents by the end of 2021, and the plans were put into effect at the national level as of 2022.

İRAP documents consist of sections on the province's general situation, hazard and risk assessments, current-situation analysis, goals, objectives and actions, and monitoring and evaluation. AFAD reports that responsible and supporting stakeholders have been identified for each action, and that a total of 221 goals, 1,290 objectives and around 17,000 disaster risk reduction actions have been defined across 81 provinces. Decree No. 4 also assigns provincial disaster and emergency management directorates the duty of preparing and implementing provincial risk reduction, response and recovery plans in cooperation with local administrations. For this reason, the municipality needs to know the actions in which it appears as responsible or supporting party under the İRAP, and to keep a record of their progress.

Under Article 9 of the regulation, local-level disaster group plans include inventories covering resources such as personnel, equipment, vehicles and tools to be assigned to the response; resources that can be obtained from supporting and nearby provinces are shown in a separate table. Under the same article, sites such as assembly areas, tent and container city areas, public buildings and sports facilities suitable for shelter, storage and distribution areas, heliport areas and temporary debris dumping sites are entered, together with their capacities and coordinates, into the Disaster Management and Decision Support System and the relevant maps.

Read together, these provisions group the information the municipality must keep up to date before a disaster under the following headings:

• Team: personnel to serve in disaster groups, their task assignments, contact information and training status.
• Equipment and vehicles: the number, location and working condition of construction machinery, fire-fighting and rescue vehicles, generators and other equipment.
• Sites: the coordinates and capacities of assembly, temporary shelter, storage, distribution and temporary debris dumping sites.
• Critical facilities: municipal service buildings, drinking water facilities, and electricity, natural gas, clean water and wastewater systems that could cause a secondary disaster.
• Building stock and address information: data kept up to date in the Spatial Address Registration System and open for AFAD's use, pursuant to Article 14 of the regulation.

The basis for the critical facilities heading is also found in the regulation. The İl Afet ve Acil Durum Koordinasyon Kurulu is responsible for preparedness work aimed at preventing the risks posed by critical facilities; institutions, for their part, are obliged to take the necessary measures for systems in their service buildings that could cause secondary disasters. Municipalities also carry out chlorination work at drinking water facilities.

This annual approval calendar also requires the inventory to be reviewed at least once a year. When information on teams, equipment and sites is scattered across different units' files, it becomes harder to tell, at the plan's approval stage and at the moment of a disaster, on what date the information was last verified.

Under the regulation, the training activities included in plans within the scope of TAMP are organised by the relevant disaster groups; exercises, for their part, are carried out under the provisions of the Regulation on Disaster and Emergency Exercises, put into effect in 2024 by Presidential Decision No. 8531. The İl Afet ve Acil Durum Koordinasyon Kurulu is also responsible for assessing the applicability of plans through exercises.

An exercise is the most concrete test of whether the information recorded in the inventory actually holds true in the field. Recording findings such as a vehicle failing to arrive within the expected time, an assembly area being found unusable, or a team's contact information being out of date, and entering them into the inventory before the next plan approval, is directly part of the municipality's duty under Article 53 to ready teams and equipment.