Monday, 4 June 2007
Information Sharing Key To Exploring Lessons Learned from Disaster
June is a significant month for ASCE as it marks the beginning of hurricane season and over the past couple of years, these extreme forces of nature have had quite an impact on our profession!
The failure of the Hurricane Protection System (HPS) around New Orleans in August 2005 was the largest engineering failure in my lifetime...and probably the largest in the history of the United States. I call this an engineering failure because some isolated portions of the HPS failed before reaching their designed loads, which raises a lot of questions for the civil engineering community. Certainly there are lessons to be learned that apply directly to the New Orleans area, but many of these lessons are general in nature and should be shared and could be applied to other locations and to structures besides levees.
It is critical that we constantly share new information and knowledge when it comes to improving our existing systems and structures to sustain future natural disasters. To that end, ASCE is hosting a 13-part webinar series on just that topic during June-September of this year. Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina and the Implications for the Civil Engineering Profession will explore the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and show how the technical elements surrounding this disaster can apply to the work done by civil engineers in all regions in the United States which are vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. Sharing this information with fellow civil engineers across the country is critical in coming up with solutions to infrastructure issues should forces of nature strike again! For more information on these webinars, visit http://www.asce.org/files/pdf/katrinaJune071.pdf.
What are you doing to prepare yourself for the upcoming hurricane season? What new knowledge have you learned lately? How can you add more value?