Category: In The News

SPA Risk LLC is updating and expanding the classic 4:1 benefit-cost analysis of natural-hazard mitigation for the National Institute of Building Sciences. To learn more, read this.

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

Charles Scawthorn gave a Guest Lecture to CE 105 “Wind and Water – Design for a Changing Environment“on the topic of Emergency Water Storage and Supply, at the invitation of Prof. Sally Thompson.  A pdf of the lecture can be found here.

SPA’s Keith Porter and Charles Scawthorn lead a session at the National Earthquake Conference in Long Beach CA, which offered lessons for emergency managers and local governments drawn from a hypothetical Mw 7.0 earthquake on the Hayward Fault in the San Francisco Bay Area. A key focus of the study is the potential for fire following earthquake. Lessons from the study included:

• Large fires increase exponentially with earthquake magnitude in a major urban area
• Gas seismic shutoff devices in selected high-density areas can significantly reduce the problem
• CERTS (Citizen Emergency Response Teams) can also mitigate the problem to some extent, but fire response is essential
• Damage to buried water pipes = loss of firefighting water and dry hydrants
• For fire departments to have a chance, they need special training and equipment to access alternative water supplies, and
• A state-wide emergency water supply system is needed.

SPA’s Charles Scawthorn gave an invited talk at NIST in January 2016 on the topic of fire following earthquake. Dr. Scawthorn’s talk emphasized the following points: Fire following earthquake is a significant problem in the seismic portions of the US, particularly in urban regions such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is potentially the largest source of loss in a major earthquake, and is a major driver for emergency responders, water agencies and catastrophe insurers. Approximately 1,600 ignitions are expected in greater Los Angeles following a major earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault, and a comparably large number of ignitions following a major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area. This and related work have identified major needs related to water distribution systems, to which a number of water agencies are now responding.

On November 5, 2015, SPA’s Keith Porter gave the concluding plenary presentation to the 2015 SEAOSC Summit Strengthening Our Cities. The presentation, entitled Dollars, deaths, and downtime: understand your building’s seismic risk and how to evaluate it, summarized for building owners and managers the history and current direction of seismic evaluations for buildings, especially the PML-type study.

On October 25, 2015, SPA’s Keith Porter moderated a session in an Understanding Risk symposium on the subject of citizen science and natural-hazard risk and how to crowdsource natural-hazard risk modeling. See the ignite presentation here.

On October 13, 2015, SPA’s Charles Scawthorn attended an organizing meeting of GADRI held at Kyoto University’s Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI), Uji, Japan.  GADRI is a new alliance of over 50 DRI’s around the world, who are organizing to promote disaster reduction science and its outreach to agencies and governments. 

On October 6, 2015, SPA’s Keith Porter spoke at SEAONC’s October Dinner Meeting, presenting a talk entitled Lessons of the HayWired Scenario: Performance of New Buildings, Public Expectations, and 3-D Ground-Motion Maps. He made the case that (1) current life-safety design objectives will lead to a severely impaired building stock in large but not exceedingly rare urban earthquakes; (2) the public expects and is willing to pay for better performance; (3) 50% stronger buildings can meet a 95% shelter-in-place objective for about 1% more cost; and (4) stronger design might be highly cost-effective.

As part of the Haywired project for the USGS, SPA’s Charles Scawthorn and Keith Porter organized a Workshop on Oct. 29 in Berkeley California.  The Workshop was co-sponsored by the USGS, UC Berkeley’s Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (OES) and the California Seismic Safety Commission, and focused on work in progress to estimate the number of fires and their spread that would result from a hypothetical Mw 7 earthquake on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay portion of the San Francisco Bay Area.  The Haywired Project is the latest in the series of USGS Science Application for Risk Reduction projects, in which Keith Porter is the lead for engineering aspects. The power point presentations for the workshop are available on SPA’s publications page here.

A magnitude Mw 6.0 affected the northern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area at 3:20 AM on 24 August 2014. SPA’s Charles Scawthorn visited the affected region, examined buildings and lifelines, spoke with fire departments, utility operators, and others. Shaking in some places reached design-level (fairly rare) motion, up to 5 times what would have been calculated for an earthquake of this magnitude. The earthquake caused one fatality and about 13 hospital admittances in Napa, with several hundred people requiring medical assistance.  In the historic city of Napa, it caused substantial damage to ordinary buildings, and very heavy damage to a number of historic masonry buildings, although some retrofitted masonry buildings had very little or no damage.  Approximately 116 buildings were red-tagged (unsafe to enter or occupy) and over five hundred yellow-tagged (limited entry), meaning that 2% of the Napa building stock was impaired by this not-very-rare earthquake.  Infrastructure was variously affected, with perhaps the water system having the most damage, with approximately 160 water main breaks.  Similar damage has been observed in several historic California earthquakes; some of it could have been readily prevented. See our publications page for the report.