8 Engineers, 3 Offices, 1 Mission: Improve Community Resilience
Aiding the local engineering community in performing safety assessments is a critical step in community recovery after an earthquake.
Reid Middleton is fielding two small earthquake teams to conduct volunteer safety assessments and perform engineering reconnaissance of the recent earthquake in Mexico City. Team 1, currently on site, is led by David Gonzalez, P.E., S.E. and is focusing on buildings and critical facilities. Team 2, departing later in the week, will focus primarily on lifelines, infrastructure, and resilience. These two teams are comprised of professional Civil and Structural Engineers from our San Diego, Seattle, and Honolulu offices. We will be onsite for 5 days each, with a slight overlap of both teams. We are coordinating our efforts with ASCE, EERI, and other professional associations in Mexico and the U.S.
Earthquakes such as this one are tragic events that test the resilience of our communities. It is important for the civil and structural engineering community to learn from these events to improve the earthquake performance of our buildings and infrastructure – ultimately benefitting the resilience of our communities. Designing buildings and infrastructure to better withstand the effects of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, blasts, and other extreme loading require that we pay attention to how our designs perform in these extreme events. Using this knowledge and our technical training to help communities recover is one of the many ways civil and structural engineers can help.
Civil engineering is “people engineering” and our volunteer engineering efforts in helping communities recover after these devastating events is an invaluable experience.