House Science Committee Issues Testimony From American Society of Civil Engineers
"Chairman Smith and honorable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak here today on behalf of the
"Defining and achieving a disaster-resilient nation is at the heart of my technical interests and the main focus of my endeavors related to advancing the profession. My activities are focused on public safety related to earthquakes, earthquake engineering, and community resilience. My efforts began by helping professional society committees write seismic codes for buildings and other structures, and quickly grew to include leadership positions in many of the related professional societies. In addition to my professional practice in structural engineering, I have participated in a wide variety of research projects that have led to new processes and procedures, design guidelines, and standards that are cited by building codes. Since 2004, my efforts have taken on a broader perspective that reach beyond the technical aspects of earthquake engineering to include understanding public policies aimed at disaster resilience. By working with the business community, public policy groups, and becoming a vocal advocate for disaster resilience at the local level, I helped start the conversation for how to achieve a disaster-resilient
"The NEHRP now embodied in the Public Law (42
"Through the re-authorization process, the law needs to be amended to recognize that the built environment in earthquake-prone regions of the nation has been generally designed and constructed to protect human life without consideration of the time it will take to repair and recover from the damage. The law also must recognize that authorization levels need to be set in recognition of the
"The NEHRP programs that are now in the law need to be continued as the new demands of community resilience are added. The term "community resilience" means the ability of a community to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Resilience starts at the local level, with individuals, families, and businesses, and the resilience of the built environment is part of the challenge. Resilience must also encompass the socio-economic and cultural aspects and needs of communities. (ACEHR 2010).
"To address the broader focus on community resilience, NEHRP should be re-authorized to include the following.
1. Identification of the gaps in seismic safety and community resilience through a nationwide risk assessment.
"Broadening the NEHRP to address community resilience in a comprehensive way requires an enhanced level of collaboration among the NEHRP agencies. As the concepts of community resilience have developed over the past 10 years, various efforts have been added to the Agency programs, though not necessarily in a collaborative manner. To move forward in an efficient manner, a fundamental assessment of the nation's earthquake risk reduction process must be conducted to identify the gaps in knowledge, implementation, and mitigation activities that are delaying the improvement of national earthquake resilience. The assessment should be comprehensive and address the steps currently being taken by government at all levels and the private sector related to the built environment as well as efforts to address the potential social and economic impacts. This assessment will refine the direction of the program going forward, stimulate collaborative efforts between the agencies, establish the needed funding levels, and the need for additional statutory responsibilities (ACEHR 2015).
2. Development of community based seismic hazard maps defining the potential for strong shaking, faulting, landslides, and liquefaction on a community scale.
"Under the leadership of
"Earthquake characterizations are available now to support the work of earthquake engineers related to individual projects but generally not available to communities in map form (Geographic Information Systems ( GIS ) based). Community resilience planning for earthquakes is best served by understanding the seismic hazards (strong shaking, faulting, landslides, and liquefaction) in the community on a block by block basis (NIST GB 1 2016). The needed GIS databases and maps are available for strong shaking estimates but not for the other hazards. These are needed immediately and are best developed at the national level by
3. Completion of the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) Seismic monitoring network for recording earthquakes and issuing early warnings throughout the nation.
"The Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) is an on-going program to modernize, expand, and integrate the nations monitoring networks. It was initiated over 10 years ago, has established the backbone of its system, and has accomplished 42 percent of its instrumentation goal, but it lacks sufficient funds to be completed. All earthquake professions use information derived from seismic monitoring. Earthquake scientists focus on understanding the source and nature of strong shaking based on the strong and weak motion recordings they obtain. Structural Engineers and their related design professional colleagues use strong motion records to better understand the behavior of the built environment, determine its damage potential under strong shaking, and fine-tune their designs to meet community needs. Economists and policy analysts focus on determining the appropriate framework for evaluating the benefits and cost effectiveness of mitigation efforts. Insurance professionals and their loss estimation consultants use the information to determine the expected dollar losses that could occur (NRC 2006). The emergency management community uses it to define scenario events for planning activities and will eventually use early warning to save lives, reduce damage, economic disruption and business downtime, and reduce psychological trauma (
"Completion of the Advanced National Seismic System will vastly improve the information learned from future earthquakes, reduce the uncertainly in the hazard characterizations, reduce the overall cost of achieving resilience, and complete the full development and deployment of the Earthquake Early Warning system. Additional authorization of funding and cooperation from the Secretary of Agriculture and Secretary of the Interior is needed to assist and expedite approvals for using public land for locating seismic monitoring instruments.
4. Development of a new generation of Seismic Standards for
"The
"They are published on a 3-year cycle and used throughout
"While there are many codes, standards, and guidelines that govern the design and construction of lifeline infrastructure systems, their focus relates to normal day-to-day operations of the system's components and do not cover the overall system's performance during earthquakes or the dependencies that exist between systems. More emphasis on risk reduction, system restoration, and societal impacts is needed along with unified performance and restoration goals across all systems. Extensive research and a new generation of codes, standards, and guidelines are needed (ATC 2016).
"In an ideal community, all buildings and infrastructure systems would recover rapidly from a strong earthquake with little interruption in services. Buildings would remain usable, infrastructure systems would remain operational, and only a few days would be needed to clean up the mess and get back to normal operations. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Buildings and infrastructure systems of any mature community have been built over generations and are subject to changing demands, retrofit or mitigation needs, and deterioration. Design codes for new buildings and retrofit codes for existing buildings do not include the performance goals needed for community resilience. Lifeline Infrastructure Systems are not regulated by national codes and are designed to performance criteria set by their owners and often without regard for the needs of the community after a strong earthquake. In addition, most existing buildings and supporting infrastructure systems do not meet current minimum code requirements and are unlikely to contribute to community resilience in their existing condition.
"Fortunately, every building and infrastructure system is not immediately needed for a community to recover efficiently. Buildings only need to be usable when needed to support recovery. For example, hospitals are needed immediately to care for the injured, but recreation centers can wait until people have time to use them. Schools are immediately needed as emergency shelters. They need to reopen to students as quickly as possible, but not before the emergency response period is over, roads are open for buses, and families are settled. By setting specific return to function goals for buildings and lifeline infrastructure, communities can use their sequence of recovery activities to determine what performance levels need to be built into functional recovery-based design and planning codes. Communities can also assess their existing built environment against the goals to determine where mitigation activities are needed, and which are highest priority.
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"NEHRP has and should continue to make Americans safer and our nation more secure, resilient, and financially stronger through research in engineering, earth and behavioral sciences, and public policy. We must also follow through with implementation of the findings through the development of design tools and assistance to States and communities with preparedness and mitigation activities. Thank you for the opportunity to share my views with the Committee regarding the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, and I urge
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