Friends,
The topic of our August Monthly Membership meeting is Resilience. These days, that term is thrown around like so much confetti, and like any buzzword or zeitgeisty sort of idea, it’s easy for us to get numb to it with overuse. So, I thought I’d share a poignant experience I had several years ago that’s been a sort of mental strop for me whenever my motivation starts to lose its edge. Or its poignt, I suppose. Some background first, but I promise I’ll get to the actual story.
A few years into my career, I made a pivot away from the new building design work that I’d originally intended to pursue. My attention had been drawn to this SEAONC committee I’d gotten involved with: Disaster Emergency Services. It started my fascination with the performance of existing buildings in natural disasters and fueled a desire to help those affected by them in that special, nerdy way that only a structural engineer could, like if Clark Kent ran into a phone booth and emerged as Clark Kent in a hardhat and vest and boots. It drew me into the urban search and rescue world and then eventually into structural forensics.
As part of that work, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to see firsthand how buildings perform after earthquakes and other natural disasters. In areas with relatively modern building codes, collapses are indeed supremely rare. Injuries are minimal. Structural damage may be significant but is generally repairable. Most structural engineers would find some areas for improvement or critique (we rarely rest on our laurels, after all) but would have high-fived and thought “mission accomplished.”
I’ve also witnessed all too often the agonizingly slow process of trying to get these buildings back online. I’ve seen landlords bending over backwards to convince their tenants that buildings are safe to occupy after hurried repairs, then do a full flip to convince their insurers that the buildings are unsafe once the skittish tenants break their lease and their building is labeled in the newspaper as “extensively damaged.” I’ve seen insurers, overwhelmed with claims, scrutinizing each one as they struggle to stay solvent, and having to pull in multiple layers of excess and reinsurers from around the world certainly doesn’t expedite the adjustment process and the resulting flow of money. After all that waiting, sitting vacant the whole time, “repairable” buildings are frequently torn down to make way for new buildings, often built in the same spot in the same way to the same codes. And that all assumes the owners have some form of catastrophe insurance to tap into.
In that environment, structural engineers are far more likely to get side-eye than adoring looks, high-fives, low bones, elbow bumps or other attaboys. I was living in Wellington, New Zealand for several months after the 2016 Kaikoura Earthquake and was checking into an Airbnb between apartment rentals. At one point the hostess introduced me to her young daughter, no more than 10 years old, and explained that I was a structural engineer. Without batting an eye, the girl said: “Oh, you must be here to help us tear all these buildings down.” Her mom laughed awkwardly, and I tried to explain that I was hoping to do the opposite, but I don’t think she was buying any of it. She wasn’t wrong. There wasn’t a lot of fixing going on, just a lot of cordoning, propping, bickering, and eventually wrecking balls. She just had the courage, or youthful impertinence, to say the quiet part out loud.
By that time, I was already fully aware of the underwhelming consequences of life-safe design targets. But that moment really flipped a switch for me, because it was the first time I realized that everyone else was too. Even worse, rather than the public seeing us as the nerdy heroes I’d imagined they would, we were seen as goats, and not the good, capitalized kind. We may have met or exceeded the performance levels we were required to hit, but it didn’t matter much to the public that we protected their lives if their livelihoods were still impacted by nonfunctional buildings.
Closer to home, we got a test of our own resilience a few years ago with COVID-19. Almost overnight, the buildings we relied on to conduct businesses were ostensibly unsafe. Fortunately, our homes generally were, and there was a capable, if somewhat underutilized, technological infrastructure in place for business collaboration and hosting awkward board game nights and happy hours. With workers doing okay at home, at least in the short term, many employers and their employees realized that there wasn’t any particular reason why they needed to base their businesses in the Bay Area, as opposed to [insert name of mid-sized city in the US interior], with cheaper housing and fewer earthquakes. While some that relocated have made their way back, many did not. Other natural disasters have far less discriminating taste than corona viruses, and our local community and economy may not get off so easily. We’re probably not going to have the good fortune of having the hardest hit buildings being the ones we’re best prepared to do without. At least not unless we take action.
Compared to the devastating number of lives lost in natural disasters in many other countries, sadness over lost revenue or social fabric could be seen as a sparkling wine problem. And as such, you could say that we structural engineers, indeed the very ones that wrote the code provisions that helped save all those lives, have held up our side of the bargain. But, fair or not, the public expects more from us, and napping on beds of flowers is not really our thing. Whether you’re in the trenches of code and standard development or just trying to get plans out in time to meet the mill order deadline, we can all be doing something to rise to the challenge. Talk to your clients. Review the architectural and MEP drawing sets a little more carefully. Spec a few extra braces on that pipe run or awkward patch of ACT when your gut says the layout might not be quite what the code intended, because it’s a lot cheaper than months of business interruption. You don’t need to be a rocket surgeon to make a meaningful difference.
And if you’re as inspired by that sassy little Kiwi as I was, consider joining the SEAONC Resilience committee. You can learn more at September’s Committee Involvement fair, or email resilience@seaonc.org.
Yours in #Resilience,
David Ojala
dojala@thorntontomasetti.com