Taking Measure: How Earthquake Reconnaissance Has Evolved Over Fifty Years

Extreme events, such as earthquakes and fires, test buildings and infrastructure in ways and on a scale that cannot be easily replicated in a laboratory. Therefore, actual disasters and failure events provide important opportunities for scientists and engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and elsewhere to study these events, and improve the safety of buildings, their occupants, and emergency responders. The keynote lecture will provide an overview of the disaster research conducted at NIST and informed by strategic plans developed by national disaster statutory programs: Disaster and Failure Studies (DFS) Program, National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP), and National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP). The lecture will highlight how the metrology of disasters has evolved since the Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) Program was established fifty years ago by the National Science Foundation, a NEHRP agency. The lecture will also provide an overview of how the advancement of tools (e.g., interview/survey instruments, GIS, data management, etc.) and technology (e.g., lidar, GPS, drones, etc.) in seismic reconnaissance missions has enabled scientists and engineers to better quantify the physical and social impacts of earthquakes on communities. The lecture will commemorate the multidisciplinary approach to learning from disasters, directly borne out of the LFE Program.