When massive natural disasters such as Hurricane Sandy strike, one may wonder how to prepare for the destruction and what could have been done differently.
Cornell University professor Dr. Thomas O’Rourke will be discussing those exact issues in his lecture, “The New Normal for Natural Disasters,” which will take place at 3:40 p.m. today in the Science and Engineering Research Facility (SERF) Room 307. It is free and open to all students, staff and faculty.
O’Rourke will present research that he has conducted on natural disasters and the infrastructure used to protect people from the destruction. More importantly, though, O’Rourke will discuss how the methods those structures are normally analyzed by need to be changed in order to be better prepared in the future.
“The new normal is that there is infrastructure that is too big to fail,” O’Rourke said. “And therefore, relying on the kind of methods for evaluating risks and perhaps conventional probability assessments is no longer adequate.”
He added, “We need to rethink how we assess risk and we need to define what’s too big to fail and take steps to assure that it does not fail.”
The inspiration for his lecture occurred in 2005 when he was selected by the army to work with the team that researched what caused the failure of the hurricane protection system in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. O’Rourke and his colleagues also looked into how to repair the system and what to look for to prepare better for future natural disasters.
During that four-year assignment, O’Rourke realized that the methods those types of protective infrastructures are evaluated by needed to be evaluated themselves.
O’Rourke then began to develop his lecture on why and how this “new normal” needed to be reassessed.
Another portion of O’Rourke’s lecture is how to go about a new reassessment strategy. He will address the problems that come with cost and how best to select which infrastructures to fix.
“That’s somewhat tricky because we can’t afford to fix everything,” O’Rourke said, “So one has to be selective, and someone has to select and develop the methodology that is affordable.”
The lecture is the 2012 Distinguished Lecture of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and is being hosted by UT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Dr. James Mason, assistant professor in the CEE Department, was the one who suggested inviting O’Rourke to UT. Having worked with O’Rourke in the past, Mason knew that O’Rourke would be perfect for coming to UT and addressing issues with natural disasters.
“There is a great need to bring an understanding of (the) hazards of natural disasters to this area,” Mason said. “And Professor O’Rourke is one of the experts in the world… The scale of projects that he works on and that his students work on are large regional problems.”
