Annual Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center Meeting Highlights Resilient Infrastructure Strategies

2024-10-28 23:24 Read: 894

Dear Participants,

The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center PEER Annual Meeting was a successful event that took place on January 28-29, 2016, at the International House on the UC Berkeley campus. I would like to ext my sincere gratitude to all attees for actively participating and contributing their valuable insights during this two-day meeting.

The first day of our meeting began with an overview of PEER's achievements in various research thrusts such as Geohazards, Tsunami studies, and Built Environment focusing on old and new reinforced concrete and steel structures, tall buildings, and rapid bridge construction. The discussion then shifted to the future directions towards Resilient Infrastructure Systems. Notably, we were enlightened by NIST-supported initiatives related to community resilience, recognizing the need for attention to infrastructure interdepencies, and expanding Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering PBEE methodologies for community recovery beyond direct engineering and ecological contexts.

On the second day of our meeting, we engaged in breakout sessions on different research areas including Geohazards, Computational Modeling and Simulation, Tsunami studies, Transportation systems, and Resilient Buildings. The culmination of this day featured an overview of outcomes from these core research areas as well as a PEER Resilience Involvement Quick Survey that provided valuable feedback for enhancing our resilience involvement strategies.

I am excited about working with the PEER community to convert the forward-thinking guidelines at the Annual Meeting into actionable research agas. Focusing on adopting PBEE methodologies and technologies for achieving resilience in our built environment is timely, considering recent developments like the White House Earthquake Resilience Summit held on February 2, 2016.

The summit emphasized that while traditional building codes m to ensure basic safety standards for preserving occupants' lives during earthquakes, true resilience requires exceeding those codes and standards to mntn essential functions post-disaster. The new Executive Order EO signed by President Obama underscores this public expectation of resiliency supported by governmental policies.

In response to these developments, PEER will prioritize increased interaction with ongoing efforts towards enhancing community resilience through ATC-58 efforts for probabilistic performance-based design guidelines, US Resiliency Council's building rating systems, NIST Community Resilience Program, San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research SPUR Resilient City approach, and research on protective systems and modeling of community functioning following earthquakes. Collaboration with the earthquake engineering community will also be a key priority.

Please feel free to share your thoughts as we work together towards resilient structures, infrastructure, and communities. Contact me at [email protected] for further discussion.

Sincerely,

PEER Center Team

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HEADQUARTERS - Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center

325 Davis Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1792

Phone: 510 642-3437

Eml: [email protected]