Thank you for joining us for the 2019-2020 Cascadia Lifelines Program Webinar series, sponsored by the Cascadia Lifelines Program!  This year we ran several webinars covering a variety of topics from recent resilience research at Oregon State University as well as special guest lectures at OSU. Each webinar typically includes a 30-40 minute presentation followed by time for questions and discussion. Recordings of the webinars are avaiable on this page. We will be back in Fall 2020 with a new line up of webinars.  

Collapsed Bridge during the 2010 Maule Chile Earthquake

 

Webinar Recording Link Date and Time Title Presenter Abstract
Thursday May 21, 2020, 1pm  Planning for Post-disaster Debris Clearance and Recovery Operations Dr. Joseph Louis

One of the primary post-disaster activities is debris removal, which can be broadly classified into emergency relief activities in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, and longer-term debris clearance which is essential for recovery. Despite this activity accounting for up to 27% of post-disaster recovery costs (FEMA 2017), most vulnerable communities are inadequately prepared to handle debris clearance operations in terms of planning for required contractual relationships and relevant logistical details. Furthermore, due to the relatively low frequency of occurrence of disaster and consequent need for debris removal, most communities do not use specialized debris removal equipment, but instead re-purpose heavy construction equipment that is meant for moving more homogenous material like soil and rock. Accordingly, there is a lack of knowledge of the productivity of such equipment for debris removal, which directly affect the post-disaster recovery time estimates and community preparedness. This webinar brings together academic literature along with lessons learned from debris clearance operations in Christchurch, NZ and Napa, California to provide best practice guidelines on identifying logistical challenges including selection of debris management sites, estimating productivity of operations, and creating pre-disaster debris removal plans for minimizing community recovery times. Other considerations including type of contractual relationships and adherence to guidelines to avail of federal recovery grants will also be discussed.
 Thursday April 16th, 2020, 11am Local Residents’ Response to the 2018 Indonesia Earthquake and Tsunami.  Dr. Haizhong Wang 

The objective of this webinar is to present and share a NSF-funded RAPID project: Local Residents' Responses to the 2018 Indonesia Earthquake and Tsunami.  The goal of this RAPID project is to use the Protective Action Decision Model– PADM as a guide to collecting empirical data on people’s behavioral responses to the Palu earthquake and tsunami.  Specifically, this project addresses a few major research objectives : 1: Collect data on the amount of time it took officials to decide to issue tsunami evacuation warnings; 2: Collect data on tsunami warning sources, channels, messages and warning dissemination times. This will include data on people’s ability to recognize earthquake shaking as an environmental cue to tsunami onset; 3: Collect data on people’s evacuation participation rates (vs. sheltering in-place), preparation times, and departure times; 4: Collect data on people’s evacuation logistics (e.g., route choices, destination/ accommodations choices, evacuation durations, and evacuation costs); 5: Assess the ability of physical, social, and household contexts; social and environmental cues; socially-transmitted warnings; demographic characteristics; prior experience; and cultural background to predict warning receipt, risk perception/personalization, evacuation decisions, and evacuation departure times.   The PIs Wang and Lindell together with local collaborator Dr. Rahmawati Husein have worked closely together and had a field trip to Palu, Indonesia from April 8th to 14th, 2019 and collected 503 samples of household responses from the affected people.  This presentation will share the reconnaissance field observations and findings.
Thursday March 19th, 2020, 1pm  Damage to critical facilities and interdependent recovery of the Paradise community after the Camp Fire of 2018   Dr. Erica Fischer

Communities are encroaching on wildland fire hazard regions as urban areas expand and remote, wild landscapes become more appealing. Paradise, California was leveled in nearly six hours during the Camp Fire in November 2018. This poster will present critical infrastructure damage within the community and aims to monitor ongoing recovery efforts. This work, funded by a Natural Hazards Center Quick Response Grant and an NSF RAPID, examined the wildfire mitigation strategies implemented by schools and hospitals in Paradise, and qualitatively assessed the effect the disruption to the operation of these critical facilities has had on the community. Many structures on the hospital campus in Paradise were damaged.Few schools completely collapsed, but many only sustained isolated damage. The school district has reopened two of its eight physical facilities and is continuing to operate in temporary locations in surrounding communities. This has caused burdens on the Paradise community and surrounding cities. Additionally, heating of plastic pipes and depressurization of the water distribution system during the fire caused water contamination. Without direct access to non-contaminated potable water, schools and other facilities have struggled to reopen throughout Paradise. The recovery efforts of the schools and hospitals are dependent upon one another as well as on the reconstruction of the housing within Paradise. The results of interviews conducted with school and hospital administrators showed that balancing the return of the various critical facilities will be imperative for residents to re-inhabit the town.
Thursday February 20th, 2020 @ 3:30pm  How past disaster rebuilding experiences can inform future disaster and climate-related
challenges		  Laurie A. Johnson PhD FAICP  Drawing upon her years of experience researching and practicing post-disaster recovery planning and management following many of the world’s major urban disasters, including Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, the 1995 Kobe and 2011 Tohoku earthquakes and tsunami in Japan and the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch New Zealand, Laurie Johnson will present key findings from her recent book, After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery. Post-disaster community recovery offers opportunities to improve construction and design standards, renew infrastructure, create new land-use arrangements, reinvent economies, and improve governance. If done well, rebuilding can also help break the cycle of disaster-related impacts and losses and improve the resilience of a city or region. The lessons presented can help communities and government leaders better organize and implement recovery after future disasters. A framework for planning, managing and retreating from future hazard-prone areas will also be presented. 
Laurie Johnson is an internationally-recognized urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management. For over 30 years, she has combined her unique blend of professional practice and research in earth science, urban planning and public policy to help communities address the complex urban challenges posed by natural hazards and disasters. Much of her post-disaster recovery work is captured in her recent book, After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (2017). Her current portfolio of work is with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, California Earthquake Authority, California Geological Survey and California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, City and County of San Francisco, New Zealand Earthquake Commission, and Wellington Regional Emergency Management Office, among others. She is also the President of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and recent chair of the Federal Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction. She holds a Doctor of Informatics degree from Kyoto University and a Master of Urban Planning and Bachelor of Science in Geophysics, both from Texas A&M University, and is a 2018 inductee into the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Certified Planners.
  Thursday January 23rd, 2020, 1pm    Oregon Hazards Explorer for Lifelines Program WebGIS Tools  Dr. Michael Olsen and Jaehoon Jung  This webinar will present tools available in O-Help for GIS personnel, engineers, planners, and others who need information related to seismic hazards.  This webinar will provide an introduction of the O-HelpwebGIS platform, the hazard layers and CSZ scenario events available, how to use the data in O-Help as well as within GIS software, and additional analysis tools available.  We will perform a live demonstration of O-Help and leave time for questions.  This webinar will also discuss current efforts underway to expand the capabilities of O-Help to serve as a decision support system. O-Help can be accessed at http://ohelp.oregonstate.edu.  
More Info  Wednesday January 22nd, 2020 at 1pm  NHERI Lehigh Seminar Series: BIM, Lidar, and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)s for earthquake Reconnaissance  Dr. Yelda Turkan

Natural disasters such as earthquakes affect millions of people and can cause significant damages to buildings and other structures. Accurate and reliable information about buildings can greatly improve post-disaster responses, such as search and rescue (S & R), repair and recovery. Both S&R and recovery require rapid assessment of the damage to a large number of buildings and other structures as accurate information is needed to support decisions regarding S&R safety, habitability and repair of these buildings and structures. Given the development of Building Information Modelling (BIM), cloud storage, and various 3D imaging technologies such as LiDAR and photogrammetry, much of the needed information for S&R and recovery can be derived automatically or semi-automatically, stored and delivered using BIM tools. Furthermore, results of previous studies suggested that 3D imaging technologies offer great potential for saving time and cost for identifying concrete cracks and spalling in 3D point clouds. This webinar will discuss how 3D imaging (both LiDAR and photogrammetry) and BIM based approaches can be leveraged to advance post-disaster structural assessment practice, thus improve post-disaster responses.

NOTE: This Webinar is part of the NHERI Lehigh Seminar Series and is being hosted by Designsafe-ci.  
Tuesday January 7, 2020 Research activities applying Geoinformatics for Disaster Management at IRIDeS, Tohoku University Erick Mas, PhD This lecture gives an overview of the various activities from the Laboratory of Remote Sensing and Geoinformatics for Disaster Management located at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. Topics are related to Satellite Remote Sensing for Damage Assessment, Agent-based modeling for evacuation simulation, Real-time tsunami numerical simulation and other topics of disaster research applying machine learning and High-performance computing. 
 Thursday November 21rst, 2019, 3 pm  The Le Val Lund Lecture on Lifeline Infrastructure and Community Resilience: Disasters, Resilience and the Next Generation  Yumei Wang, PE  Yumei Wang, PE is the 2018 Le Val Lund Award recipient from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The Le Val Lund Award for Practicing Lifeline Risk Reduction recognizes an individual for contributions to the practice of reducing risks to lifeline systems and preparing communities for natural and manmade hazards.In her talk, Yumei Wang will present a challenge to engineers and other professionals to develop new and transformative approaches for improving society’s resilience to future natural disasters. The severity and consequences of disasters caused by natural hazards are greatly affected by the functionality of critical lifeline infrastructure after the events. The resilience of critical lifeline infrastructure – related to fuel, power, water, transportation, and communications – is essential for reducing the frequency and impact of future disasters. Currently, various lifeline systems are designed and operated independently; yet many systems depend on each other to function. A single failure in one lifeline system can lead to multiple failures across multiple systems and escalate into a much larger and more complex disaster. To prevent severe critical infrastructure failures and minimize the detrimental societal effects of major and regional disasters such as a Cascadia earthquake and tsunami, we need to develop new coordinated approaches among system designers and operators to better understand, integrate, and control the delivery of services.
Thursday October 24th, 2019, 1pm  InterACTWEL Science Gateway for Adaptation Planning in Food-Energy-Water Sectors of Local Communities  Dr. Meghna Babbar-Sebens  InterACTWEL (Interactive Adaptation and Collaboration Tool for managing Water, Energy and Land) is envisioned to be transformational decision support ecosystem with state-of-the-art analytics and visualization capabilities that, once launched and adopted, will empower land, water, energy managers and food producers to conceptualize and co-plan towards a resilient future for their local communities. InterACTWEL is aimed to help communities identify natural resources management decisions over time, and for long-term adaptation to drastic changes that they do not have control of, such as severe water restriction, changing state laws, and changing climatic patterns. Read More
Creating such capabilities for large communities to prepare for an evolving future of changes requires creation of, access to, and use of complex and multi-sectoral datasets of varying sizes, advanced simulation models, large-scale optimization algorithms, visualization techniques for rendering of complex decision and goal spaces, as well as interfaces that facilitate end-user engagement and cognitive learning. Since public and private sectoral stakeholders (e.g., farmers, energy producers, municipalities, food processors, regulatory and non-regulatory governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations, tribes) in local communities are all direct and life-long beneficiaries of resource management tools generated by the research community, the Science Gateway must support needs and activities of a diverse personas of end-user. This webinar will describe the user base, functionalities, and services in the novel Science Gateway (ScG) InterACTWEL designed to enable research and practitioner community to sustain translational research goals and long-lasting collaboration between researchers and citizens.
Thursday September 26th, 2019, 1pm  Use of In-Situ Liquefaction Testing to Guide the Port’s Seismic Resilience Planning

Dr. Armin Stuedlein

 

 The Cascadia Subduction Zone, running 1,000 km from Northern California in the south to British Columbia in the north, last ruptured on 26 January 1700 with an estimated moment magnitude of ~9.0, and produced a tsunami that resulted in thousands of deaths and casualties as far away as Japan. The likelihood of the next Cascadia earthquake ranges from 7 to 12% and 37 to 42% in 50 years for the northern and southern margins of the subduction zone, respectively. Accordingly, significant interest in improving seismic resiliency has increased by the owners of civil infrastructure, including departments of transportation and ports. As part of its long-term resilience goals, the Port of Portland, located in Portland, Oregon, has determined that one of its two runways must be hardened against the vertical and lateral deformations anticipated following rupture of the Cascadia Subduction Zone and the nearby, though smaller, Port Hills fault. Read More
A portion or all of both runways lie in close proximity to the Columbia River, which has been dredged to maintain shipping freighters to depths as great as 20 m. Lateral spreading has been determined to pose a significant risk to the runways, given that the subsurface consists of dredge sand fill, medium stiff silt, and a deep deposit of medium dense sand. Prior to selecting and executing a costly ground improvement program, the Port has determined that an improved understanding of the cyclic resistance of the silt and sand deposits is warranted. Deep, in-situ blast liquefaction experiments conducted by Oregon State University served to provide a means to understand the seismic performance of these soils without the possible effects of sample disturbance, small sample-size effects, artificial drainage conditions, and under existing mechanical, hydrogeological, and thermal conditions.
June 12, 2018 Oregon Hazards Explorer for Lifelines Program WebGIS Tools

Dr. Ben Leshchinsky and Nick Matthews

 

  This webinar presented an overview of the tools available in O-Help for GIS personnel, engineers, planners, and others who need information related to seismic hazards.  This webinar will provide an introduction of the O-HelpwebGIS platform, the hazard layers and CSZ scenario events available, how to use the data in O-Help as well as within GIS software, and additional analysis tools available.  We will perform a live demonstration of O-Help and leave time for questions. O-Help is available at http://ohelp.oregonstate.edu.