Development of seismic fragilities for a base station steel lattice cellular tower.

A large portion of the country of Turkey is located in a very high seismic region known as a first-degree earthquake zone where earthquakes occur frequently. Earthquakes result in damage to infrastructure including base station towers and subsequently failure of mobile communication networks. The loss of functionality of mobile communication networks following an earthquake has a direct impact on emergency response and both short and long-term recovery phases.

Getting Interdisciplinary Teams into the Field: Institutional Review Board Preapproval and Multi-Institution Authorization Agreements for Rapid Response Disaster Research.

This article describes an interdisciplinary community resilience research project and presents a case study that supports bringing researchers together before a disaster to develop plans, procedures, and preapproved Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols. In addition, this article explains how researchers from various academic institutions and their federal agency partners can effectively collaborate by creating an IRB Authorization Agreement (IAA). Such preparations can support interdisciplinary rapid response disaster fieldwork that is timely, ethically informed, and scientifically rigorous.

Hurricane Surge-Wave Building Fragility Methodology for Use in Damage, Loss, and Resilience Analysis.

Physics-based fragilities for damage, loss, and resilience analysis are needed to model a community to earthquakes, hurricane winds, tornados, or floods. Currently, most building flood fragilities such as those available in assessment tools such as HAZUS-MH do not account for the hydrodynamic forces caused by surge and waves, only the depth of a flood. In this paper, a methodology to evaluate forces on all building components including windows, doors, walls, and floor systems for elevated coastal buildings under a combination of hurricane surge and waves is proposed.

Quantifying Socioeconomic Impact of a Tornado by Estimating Population Outmigration as a Resilience Metric at the Community Level.

Policymakers, community leaders, engineers, and researchers have gained interest in understanding tornado-resilient buildings, in part because of the number of deadly and destructive tornadoes over the last decade. In addition to direct losses, such as deaths and damages, tornadoes may also cause many indirect losses as a result of the highly coupled networks within communities. When networks are disrupted, this can cause which, if significant and long-lasting enough, may exacerbate a community's indirect socioeconomic losses over time.

State of the research in community resilience: progress and challenges.

Community resilience has been addressed across multiple disciplines including environmental sciences, engineering, sociology, psychology, and economics. Interest in community resilience gained momentum following several key natural and human-caused hazards in the United States and worldwide. To date, a comprehensive community resilience model that encompasses the performance of all the physical and socio-economic components from immediate impact through the recovery phase of a natural disaster has not been available.

Experimental Modeling of Horizontal and Vertical Wave Forces on an Elevated Coastal Structure.

A large-scale physical model was created in Oregon State University's Large Wave Flume to collect an extensive dataset measuring wave-induced horizontal and vertical forces on an idealized coastal structure. Water depth was held constant while wave conditions included regular, irregular, and transient (tsunami-like) waves with different significant wave heights and peak periods for each test. The elevation of the base of the test specimen with respect to the stillwater depth (air gap) was also varied from at-grade to 0.