Improving community resilience through earthquake reconnaissance.
32 years after the 1985 Earthquake, Central Mexico and the surrounding region was severely impacted by the devastating September 19, 2017 M7.1 earthquake. Reid Middleton, Inc., sent eight engineers from three offices to perform post-earthquake recovery work and reconnaissance. Our efforts focused on buildings, critical facilities (hospitals, police, fire, etc.) and earthquake performance and disaster resilience of lifelines (water, wastewater, transportation, power, telecommunications systems).
Much of our work was performing volunteer post-earthquake building safety assessments for the local government, assisting volunteers with structural evaluation of collapsed structures, and investigating earthquake performance of buildings and lifelines infrastructure.
The data we collected will be used to enhance the earthquake performance, reliability, and efficiency of our design work and also lower the cost of seismic upgrades. This important work translates to real benefits to our client’s projects, portfolio, communities, and our engineering profession. It is seismic advocacy in action.
Our post-reconnaissance technical report with observations and the insights and information the team gleaned is available here.
