hi everybody
I don’t think I need to say much more
than that it was very good introduction
it’s an easy topic what I want to talk
about it has to do with extreme events
that we cannot predict and in recent
years we know that extreme natural
hazards have been extremely destructive
and more frequent just 2016 was the
worst year in natural hazard losses with
estimates on the order of more than one
hundred and fifty billion dollars from
the Swiss reinsurance one of these
events that I will be referring to is
the Ecuador earthquake that happened in
April of 2016 of a magnitude 7.8 but
more than the damage what we have
learned is that extreme natural hazards
can cause tremendous losses in terms of
downtime of things not working and an
example in the city where I live and
work in New York City was the 2012
hurricane sandy where the financial
damage was more than seventy billion
dollars locally owned losses of things
not working essentially we did not
really have any structural damage but we
had flooding that prevented us from
functioning and globally of course there
was a tremendous effect because the Wall
Street shut down for two days so these
are issues that affect an infrastructure
that is already age beyond the design
life that we have made it as designers
which is typically 50 years it’s
trembling as it is without any
earthquake or wind or other loads and we
know that just to maintain the rapid
increase of our population if we wanted
to use this existing infrastructure
without any natural hazards hitting it
on top of it we need six trillion
dollars a year and we are only investing
three so we have an issue so what do we
as engineers have in certain tools and
usually these tools are codes and codes
have existed for many many years
tracing back thousands of years ago in
Mesopotamia in the Code of Hammurabi
that essentially said that if a builder
builds a house and this house is
destroyed
after an earthquake or for whatever
other reason then this builder shall be
put to death and the same for his child
if the child of the owner is dead
very straightforward very scary I’m sure
it was quite convincing right now we
have evolved from that and we can
calculate probabilities of this maximum
earthquake happening and how big it’s
going to be and we have put all that in
codes and the most recent code from the
American Society of Civil Engineers
gives actual probabilities so if you are
now in Mesopotamia you want to build the
same house then you know that you are
accepting our society as a code that you
will have a 10% probability of this
house collapsing if that big earthquake
happens you are also accepting a 25%
probability that you will be hurt or
died in that big earthquake
why do we have this boundaries it’s a
matter of economics because we cannot
build the perfect house it could cost so
much
so we put boundaries and this is what
our society is accepting and there is a
fundamental cornerstone of these codes
which is what we call life safety and
this is something that we have been
using for many many many years more than
20 years
what graph shows you and I refer you to
the very end of it is that for the very
rare event you will be on a state of
collapse prevention that means that your
structure is going to have a lot of
damage it may not be working it may need
to be destroyed but right after the
earthquake it’s going to give you the
chance to get out of it alive and that’s
how we define life safety now this is
something we have used for a very very
long time
and our society I think has moved beyond
that because if you have this life
safety objective you may not have
running water you may not have bathroom
in your house you may not have
electricity so you cannot use it if your
house eventually has to be demolished
it’s going to affect your life it’s
going to affect your happiness right and
all of these do not go into our mouth
and in our code but there is a term that
is used and oftenly overused called
resilience that society demands and
sometimes uses it without real and I was
surprised when I went to Ecuador the day
after in the front page of the biggest
magazine for the area of Manabi that
basically it was a province that was
completely destroyed it became ground
zero the first page showing the total
destruction called from the people of
Ecuador asking for resiliency they did
not ask rebuild my house give me back my
job bring food for my children
they said resilience
so is resiliency the answer to
everything or resilience so looking at
beauty pageants it has always been a
very common question of what do you want
to see for the world and historically I
can show you over the time that always
the answer has been world peace world
peace until 2013 where a zillion thing
was in fashion where Miss Philippines
declared she wanted to sing resilience
and she was crowned Miss World
so sometimes we may overuse or think
that resilience is the answer to
everything but is it in engineering what
we know for sure and is that we have to
define things otherwise we cannot apply
them we have tools and we need to use
those two we have come up with as a
definition of the thousand among the
thousands definitions of resilience is
our ability to anticipate prepare for
adapt to changing conditions withstand
and rapidly recover from disastrous
events so essentially when you look at
it even in the Greek dictionaries the
resilience has a sense of elastic otakus
or bouncing back and really I’m not sure
if that’s the was engineers I don’t want
to go back to this picture in hurricane
sandy I don’t want to go back to this
picture in Ecuador I want to bounce
forward to something better and how do
we do this one of the ways to to apply
resilience is to plan ahead we cannot
predict extreme events but we have tools
to prevent them from becoming disasters
and this has been proven FEMA the
Federal Emergency Management Agency has
in
and has studied how much is a return in
terms of prevention and you can see that
if you invest $1.00 in prevention for
wind or flood when that flood happens
you will get back five dollars in return
so prevention is really worth it it’s a
little less for earthquakes but still
you get a return so we know that
resilience works we know we have seen it
in the most important factor which is
the loss of life and what you see here
is a comparison between two earthquakes
that happen in 2010 on your right there
is the mega earthquake of Chile
magnitude 9 and on the left is a high D
earthquake which was significantly
smaller magnitude than the Chile
what you see is the percentage of people
who felt the earthquake very strongly
and confirmed by Facebook and that lost
their lives so in Chile there was only
0.1% of the people in the epicentral
area if they’re large intensity area
that lost their lives versus 11% in
Haiti in a significantly smaller event
Chile has good earthquake codes they
design for earthquakes in Haiti there is
it’s a country under development and
they don’t have good codes and good
construction so it’s proven that
resiliency works so why are we doing
better we have all these tools all these
math predictions we can predict hazard
floods tsunamis and all these what are
we missing we are missing something
about the human factor it is not wearing
the probabilities I showed you and this
is a very graphic example from the
earthquake in New Zealand in
Christchurch actually to put a series of
earthquakes from 2010 to 2011 that
exhibited very impressive continuous
effects of liquefaction and many of you
know what that is you can function
essentially is a phenomenon where your
solely turns into something like moving
sign liquid Sun because of the strong
ground shaking and it can flood your
area this is a house in the first
earthquake of Christchurch in September
of 2010 that Professor Jonathan Bray
from Berkeley kept monitoring over time
this house proved that it satisfied life
safety as I described eg there were no
crabs there was nothing like that but he
the port’s sustained liquefaction you
can see that from all the water that is
around there a bigger earthquake
happened after this owner had fixed what
happened there
and in February a bigger earthquake
happened and a faction happen again and
even worse what you see as these bubbles
is sun boils that happen after local
faction well the owner said that now I’m
going to go and put pavers and make it
stronger and pave it so in a bridge we
had another earthquake and actually I
think the papers probably made it worse
and he had even more liquefaction and
then in June 2011 he put different
papers put asphalt whatever he did part
1 and part 2 so what I’m asking
life safety is still ok right his house
is working there are no cracks
is this a quality of life is this what
he wants he’s now in a flood zone where
he wasn’t before he went and asked for
money to repair the his house and the
earthquake insurance told him it’s a
flood problem and the flood insurance
told him it’s not my fault the
earthquake created the liquefaction that
made you in a free heart zone and now
you’re in flood zone so what is this
person going to do I don’t know if you
guys moved yet from that house they just
had an earthquake a couple of months ago
so
are we really bouncing back with these
concepts of life safety this is a
studies that I’m showing this a cover
from the time magazine in from the
kaabah earthquake in 1995 showing the
human bein of a natural disaster in
their studies studying people and how
they bounce back after big earthquakes
after Koba and after Fukushima and what
you see is that years after the event
about half the people have PTSD
post-traumatic stress disorders and more
than half of them have some form of
depression and factors that they use
instead of the numerical things they use
different factors of behavior how many
people started drinking how many people
started exercising how many people lost
their jobs and never found them found
another job how many people lost their
little coffee shop that they gather with
their friends after work and what made
them happy and these are the factors
that we as engineers completely neglect
in the codes is the human factors and
the long-term recovery when we talk
about resilience so what I’m getting to
and I was told that many of you may not
understand what first analysis means it
means what the hell are we talking about
what is the elephant in the room here
who are we working for I’m an engineer
Who am I supposed to report to am I
supposed to report to my boss am I
supposed to report to the government
that makes these codes or is my
obligation to a pre protect societies
and I think that we can do a very good
job complying with codes but we cannot
neglect this other part so you know
sometimes we will look at our own little
thing and we’re missing the big picture
this is what resilience is all about is
about the big picture
and the big picture in my view involves
understanding what hazards we are
exposed to and we have a lot of science
and understanding and very good tools to
understand that and make all these
probabilities and all that and then use
technologies preventive measures that
could be multidisciplinary in order to
achieve resilience and resilience is
something that is a decision-making
about what we want to do about this
community do we want it to last five
years do we want it to to be perfect
after 2,500 years but that’s not my
problem as an engineer that is on a
higher level of a stakeholder or
decision makers but I need to give the
options to these people and clearly
explain to them how much they’re gonna
cost and where they have to invest so
there are some key things that we need
to do it moving towards that is to
collaborate educate think simple in
order to make decisions and risk which
is a part of a decision-making always is
coupled with a reward so you can have
the salad and get long-term health or
you can have the chocolate cake and get
the short-term Mirage of the chocolate
they’re both acceptable solutions to
your decision right but there are
different consequences this is what
resiliency has to do give you decisions
and give you what the consequences are
so that you can make educated decisions
and we have to think think before we
blindly look at one problem and people
have very short memories of events that
happen so after Hurricane sandy FEMA
came with new flood maps and they asked
that houses are raised above the flood
level so that they are protected from
the next flood which is great look at
this house multi dollar dollar house in
a very nice area in the water
this flag protected and many of you in
this room I hope that you know what the
soft story is in they’re going to do
very bad even in a small earthquakes it
will cut its legs off it’s not made to
resist the other hazard that it could be
exposed to or even wind so we have to
think about multi hazards we also have
to think and respect nature this is a
bridge in teaching Taiwan that was
designed according to code and it was
perfectly designed but the fault that
was running through it was not respected
so it failed miserably in that
earthquake and also in earthquakes not
only in earthquakes do we have to make
things stronger to make them better
that’s a perception really do we need to
do that or do we need to think
resiliency do we need to think out of
the box it takes minds that think
differently and I call for you to start
thinking differently because it is a
very complex problem this bridge in the
foki eye section in the cassini
expressway in Japan that you saw
collapsed because we try to fix it into
the ground with very
[Music]
connection over there and eventually as
you saw before it could not have been
designed and stronger than that I mean
you can happen so differently there has
to be somebody who thinks out of the box
I hope it’s going to be you it in this
case it is my teacher and mentor who
sits here George pizzetta’s who thought
that okay I will under design it make it
smaller allow the soil to give in and
that way I’m going to relieve of all
this pressure that is right there in
that connection that way I’m going to
prevent polar collapse but also minimize
the seismic damage and then I can go and
fix it and there are ways that we have
as engineers to fix things like that so
this is a different way of looking
things thinking out of the box out of
your comfort zone it’s not easy to apply
these things so what I want to summarize
and what I said that resilience is a
very difficult problem and we can carve
our engineering tools in order to create
future cities working together though
with the architects with the planners
with the test take holders it’s a
continuous dialogue because everybody
speaks their own language and have their
own little interest and engineering is
just a tiny part of that we have to
understand that resilience is not the
answer to everything it’s just a part of
a puzzle the puzzle is much bigger than
that
and the challenge that we have because
we like numbers and that’s what we do is
to translate this desire that we have
for resilient communities into terms
that we can put into codes and also to
consider how aged our structures are in
our infrastructure and eventually give
this decision tools to the people that
are higher than us and that requires a
holistic approach with education
communication
and the to wait trust communication
between the government and the people
and the people have to be part of this
decision making and have to be part of
these numbers that we put there and of
course create economic growth which is a
bigger picture and health care and
overall democracy so thinking’s simple I
would like to quote the Nobel laureate
avi Sasson letís in terms of life
quality who said that if you deconstruct
Greece at the end you will be left with
an olive tree agrarian and say bored and
really seized in the lava and so tell us
the mean is Monica Ravi Annabelle
Kamiya I am think we have to look at
things differently and think of our
human as a factor of engineering
decision and engineering design thank
you very much
[Applause]
I don’t think I need to say much more
than that it was very good introduction
it’s an easy topic what I want to talk
about it has to do with extreme events
that we cannot predict and in recent
years we know that extreme natural
hazards have been extremely destructive
and more frequent just 2016 was the
worst year in natural hazard losses with
estimates on the order of more than one
hundred and fifty billion dollars from
the Swiss reinsurance one of these
events that I will be referring to is
the Ecuador earthquake that happened in
April of 2016 of a magnitude 7.8 but
more than the damage what we have
learned is that extreme natural hazards
can cause tremendous losses in terms of
downtime of things not working and an
example in the city where I live and
work in New York City was the 2012
hurricane sandy where the financial
damage was more than seventy billion
dollars locally owned losses of things
not working essentially we did not
really have any structural damage but we
had flooding that prevented us from
functioning and globally of course there
was a tremendous effect because the Wall
Street shut down for two days so these
are issues that affect an infrastructure
that is already age beyond the design
life that we have made it as designers
which is typically 50 years it’s
trembling as it is without any
earthquake or wind or other loads and we
know that just to maintain the rapid
increase of our population if we wanted
to use this existing infrastructure
without any natural hazards hitting it
on top of it we need six trillion
dollars a year and we are only investing
three so we have an issue so what do we
as engineers have in certain tools and
usually these tools are codes and codes
have existed for many many years
tracing back thousands of years ago in
Mesopotamia in the Code of Hammurabi
that essentially said that if a builder
builds a house and this house is
destroyed
after an earthquake or for whatever
other reason then this builder shall be
put to death and the same for his child
if the child of the owner is dead
very straightforward very scary I’m sure
it was quite convincing right now we
have evolved from that and we can
calculate probabilities of this maximum
earthquake happening and how big it’s
going to be and we have put all that in
codes and the most recent code from the
American Society of Civil Engineers
gives actual probabilities so if you are
now in Mesopotamia you want to build the
same house then you know that you are
accepting our society as a code that you
will have a 10% probability of this
house collapsing if that big earthquake
happens you are also accepting a 25%
probability that you will be hurt or
died in that big earthquake
why do we have this boundaries it’s a
matter of economics because we cannot
build the perfect house it could cost so
much
so we put boundaries and this is what
our society is accepting and there is a
fundamental cornerstone of these codes
which is what we call life safety and
this is something that we have been
using for many many many years more than
20 years
what graph shows you and I refer you to
the very end of it is that for the very
rare event you will be on a state of
collapse prevention that means that your
structure is going to have a lot of
damage it may not be working it may need
to be destroyed but right after the
earthquake it’s going to give you the
chance to get out of it alive and that’s
how we define life safety now this is
something we have used for a very very
long time
and our society I think has moved beyond
that because if you have this life
safety objective you may not have
running water you may not have bathroom
in your house you may not have
electricity so you cannot use it if your
house eventually has to be demolished
it’s going to affect your life it’s
going to affect your happiness right and
all of these do not go into our mouth
and in our code but there is a term that
is used and oftenly overused called
resilience that society demands and
sometimes uses it without real and I was
surprised when I went to Ecuador the day
after in the front page of the biggest
magazine for the area of Manabi that
basically it was a province that was
completely destroyed it became ground
zero the first page showing the total
destruction called from the people of
Ecuador asking for resiliency they did
not ask rebuild my house give me back my
job bring food for my children
they said resilience
so is resiliency the answer to
everything or resilience so looking at
beauty pageants it has always been a
very common question of what do you want
to see for the world and historically I
can show you over the time that always
the answer has been world peace world
peace until 2013 where a zillion thing
was in fashion where Miss Philippines
declared she wanted to sing resilience
and she was crowned Miss World
so sometimes we may overuse or think
that resilience is the answer to
everything but is it in engineering what
we know for sure and is that we have to
define things otherwise we cannot apply
them we have tools and we need to use
those two we have come up with as a
definition of the thousand among the
thousands definitions of resilience is
our ability to anticipate prepare for
adapt to changing conditions withstand
and rapidly recover from disastrous
events so essentially when you look at
it even in the Greek dictionaries the
resilience has a sense of elastic otakus
or bouncing back and really I’m not sure
if that’s the was engineers I don’t want
to go back to this picture in hurricane
sandy I don’t want to go back to this
picture in Ecuador I want to bounce
forward to something better and how do
we do this one of the ways to to apply
resilience is to plan ahead we cannot
predict extreme events but we have tools
to prevent them from becoming disasters
and this has been proven FEMA the
Federal Emergency Management Agency has
in
and has studied how much is a return in
terms of prevention and you can see that
if you invest $1.00 in prevention for
wind or flood when that flood happens
you will get back five dollars in return
so prevention is really worth it it’s a
little less for earthquakes but still
you get a return so we know that
resilience works we know we have seen it
in the most important factor which is
the loss of life and what you see here
is a comparison between two earthquakes
that happen in 2010 on your right there
is the mega earthquake of Chile
magnitude 9 and on the left is a high D
earthquake which was significantly
smaller magnitude than the Chile
what you see is the percentage of people
who felt the earthquake very strongly
and confirmed by Facebook and that lost
their lives so in Chile there was only
0.1% of the people in the epicentral
area if they’re large intensity area
that lost their lives versus 11% in
Haiti in a significantly smaller event
Chile has good earthquake codes they
design for earthquakes in Haiti there is
it’s a country under development and
they don’t have good codes and good
construction so it’s proven that
resiliency works so why are we doing
better we have all these tools all these
math predictions we can predict hazard
floods tsunamis and all these what are
we missing we are missing something
about the human factor it is not wearing
the probabilities I showed you and this
is a very graphic example from the
earthquake in New Zealand in
Christchurch actually to put a series of
earthquakes from 2010 to 2011 that
exhibited very impressive continuous
effects of liquefaction and many of you
know what that is you can function
essentially is a phenomenon where your
solely turns into something like moving
sign liquid Sun because of the strong
ground shaking and it can flood your
area this is a house in the first
earthquake of Christchurch in September
of 2010 that Professor Jonathan Bray
from Berkeley kept monitoring over time
this house proved that it satisfied life
safety as I described eg there were no
crabs there was nothing like that but he
the port’s sustained liquefaction you
can see that from all the water that is
around there a bigger earthquake
happened after this owner had fixed what
happened there
and in February a bigger earthquake
happened and a faction happen again and
even worse what you see as these bubbles
is sun boils that happen after local
faction well the owner said that now I’m
going to go and put pavers and make it
stronger and pave it so in a bridge we
had another earthquake and actually I
think the papers probably made it worse
and he had even more liquefaction and
then in June 2011 he put different
papers put asphalt whatever he did part
1 and part 2 so what I’m asking
life safety is still ok right his house
is working there are no cracks
is this a quality of life is this what
he wants he’s now in a flood zone where
he wasn’t before he went and asked for
money to repair the his house and the
earthquake insurance told him it’s a
flood problem and the flood insurance
told him it’s not my fault the
earthquake created the liquefaction that
made you in a free heart zone and now
you’re in flood zone so what is this
person going to do I don’t know if you
guys moved yet from that house they just
had an earthquake a couple of months ago
so
are we really bouncing back with these
concepts of life safety this is a
studies that I’m showing this a cover
from the time magazine in from the
kaabah earthquake in 1995 showing the
human bein of a natural disaster in
their studies studying people and how
they bounce back after big earthquakes
after Koba and after Fukushima and what
you see is that years after the event
about half the people have PTSD
post-traumatic stress disorders and more
than half of them have some form of
depression and factors that they use
instead of the numerical things they use
different factors of behavior how many
people started drinking how many people
started exercising how many people lost
their jobs and never found them found
another job how many people lost their
little coffee shop that they gather with
their friends after work and what made
them happy and these are the factors
that we as engineers completely neglect
in the codes is the human factors and
the long-term recovery when we talk
about resilience so what I’m getting to
and I was told that many of you may not
understand what first analysis means it
means what the hell are we talking about
what is the elephant in the room here
who are we working for I’m an engineer
Who am I supposed to report to am I
supposed to report to my boss am I
supposed to report to the government
that makes these codes or is my
obligation to a pre protect societies
and I think that we can do a very good
job complying with codes but we cannot
neglect this other part so you know
sometimes we will look at our own little
thing and we’re missing the big picture
this is what resilience is all about is
about the big picture
and the big picture in my view involves
understanding what hazards we are
exposed to and we have a lot of science
and understanding and very good tools to
understand that and make all these
probabilities and all that and then use
technologies preventive measures that
could be multidisciplinary in order to
achieve resilience and resilience is
something that is a decision-making
about what we want to do about this
community do we want it to last five
years do we want it to to be perfect
after 2,500 years but that’s not my
problem as an engineer that is on a
higher level of a stakeholder or
decision makers but I need to give the
options to these people and clearly
explain to them how much they’re gonna
cost and where they have to invest so
there are some key things that we need
to do it moving towards that is to
collaborate educate think simple in
order to make decisions and risk which
is a part of a decision-making always is
coupled with a reward so you can have
the salad and get long-term health or
you can have the chocolate cake and get
the short-term Mirage of the chocolate
they’re both acceptable solutions to
your decision right but there are
different consequences this is what
resiliency has to do give you decisions
and give you what the consequences are
so that you can make educated decisions
and we have to think think before we
blindly look at one problem and people
have very short memories of events that
happen so after Hurricane sandy FEMA
came with new flood maps and they asked
that houses are raised above the flood
level so that they are protected from
the next flood which is great look at
this house multi dollar dollar house in
a very nice area in the water
this flag protected and many of you in
this room I hope that you know what the
soft story is in they’re going to do
very bad even in a small earthquakes it
will cut its legs off it’s not made to
resist the other hazard that it could be
exposed to or even wind so we have to
think about multi hazards we also have
to think and respect nature this is a
bridge in teaching Taiwan that was
designed according to code and it was
perfectly designed but the fault that
was running through it was not respected
so it failed miserably in that
earthquake and also in earthquakes not
only in earthquakes do we have to make
things stronger to make them better
that’s a perception really do we need to
do that or do we need to think
resiliency do we need to think out of
the box it takes minds that think
differently and I call for you to start
thinking differently because it is a
very complex problem this bridge in the
foki eye section in the cassini
expressway in Japan that you saw
collapsed because we try to fix it into
the ground with very
[Music]
connection over there and eventually as
you saw before it could not have been
designed and stronger than that I mean
you can happen so differently there has
to be somebody who thinks out of the box
I hope it’s going to be you it in this
case it is my teacher and mentor who
sits here George pizzetta’s who thought
that okay I will under design it make it
smaller allow the soil to give in and
that way I’m going to relieve of all
this pressure that is right there in
that connection that way I’m going to
prevent polar collapse but also minimize
the seismic damage and then I can go and
fix it and there are ways that we have
as engineers to fix things like that so
this is a different way of looking
things thinking out of the box out of
your comfort zone it’s not easy to apply
these things so what I want to summarize
and what I said that resilience is a
very difficult problem and we can carve
our engineering tools in order to create
future cities working together though
with the architects with the planners
with the test take holders it’s a
continuous dialogue because everybody
speaks their own language and have their
own little interest and engineering is
just a tiny part of that we have to
understand that resilience is not the
answer to everything it’s just a part of
a puzzle the puzzle is much bigger than
that
and the challenge that we have because
we like numbers and that’s what we do is
to translate this desire that we have
for resilient communities into terms
that we can put into codes and also to
consider how aged our structures are in
our infrastructure and eventually give
this decision tools to the people that
are higher than us and that requires a
holistic approach with education
communication
and the to wait trust communication
between the government and the people
and the people have to be part of this
decision making and have to be part of
these numbers that we put there and of
course create economic growth which is a
bigger picture and health care and
overall democracy so thinking’s simple I
would like to quote the Nobel laureate
avi Sasson letís in terms of life
quality who said that if you deconstruct
Greece at the end you will be left with
an olive tree agrarian and say bored and
really seized in the lava and so tell us
the mean is Monica Ravi Annabelle
Kamiya I am think we have to look at
things differently and think of our
human as a factor of engineering
decision and engineering design thank
you very much
[Applause]
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