 Hello, everyone. My name is Craig Davis, and I'm a member of the Committee on Geological and Geotechnical Engineering, and we'll serve as your moderator today. The Committee on Geologic and Geotechnical Engineering is also known as CAGA. CAGA is a standing committee on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Board on Earth Sciences and Resources. CAGA was established as the local point within the National Academies for Government, Industry, and Academia on Technical and Public Policy Issues related to Earth processes and materials, soil and rock mechanics, responsible human development, and mitigation of natural and human hazards. If you have any questions about CAGA, please contact Samantha Magsino, the National Academy's staff director of the committee. Her email will be posted on the chat. The webinar is part of a quarterly webinar series. This webinar is produced by CAGA through the support of the National Science Foundation. The webinar will be posted on YouTube. An announcement will be sent out when it is available. Open your chats for messages from us and for the speaker bios. We will have time for questions and answers to the panelists who have given their talks. The audience can submit their questions anytime using the Q&A tab on the Zoom panel for the screens. Please do not submit your questions using the chat. Use the Q&A tab. We will pose as many questions as time permits to the speakers. A disclaimer, any opinions, conclusions, or recommendations expressed by the panelists or anyone during the webinar are those of the individuals and do not represent conclusions or recommendations of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Sam Magsino and Emily Bermuda set up the webinar and are producing it. Our speakers today are Lori Johnson from Lori Johnson Consulting and Robert Olshansky, Professor of Meriticity University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They will be presenting on post-disaster context considerations for engineers. Lori and Rob will provide a brief self-introduction during the presentation. Lori and Rob, please take over the webinar. Can everyone see that? Craig? Rob? Yes. Yes, good, Lori. Great. Thank you. And good morning or good afternoon to all of you or wherever else you may be and what time zone you're in. Rob and I are really excited to be here today. I'm going to kick things off and we're going to just toggle back and forth through this presentation. Let me see here. I am not advancing. So we're going to have three parts to our presentation. The first is really what we're calling the context, some basics about the post-disaster period of time and space and how that's different from normal communities and normal times. We're going to illustrate those comments with some examples from our research and practice and then wrap it up with some comments about insights for engineers working in the post-disaster context. So we are drawing a lot on a book that Rob and I did in 2017, which really is a compilation of a great deal of our joint collaborative research over 30 years. And that book is available for free download at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. It's just linkinist.edu. There are two versions of the book as we show here. And the reason Rob and I are urban planners, but as we got further into our research, we realized that we wanted to share something with those observations from our events that were really around the issues of management and governance of large-scale disasters. And that's what this book is designed for. It's really to summarize the cases and provide insights for future prime ministers, mayors, governors, presidents who might have responsibility for a catastrophic urban disaster like all of those that are listed here. So you can see the six countries that we featured and focus on in the book, the U.S., China, Japan, Indonesia, India, and New Zealand and the different events from those disasters. So we'll be drawing from some of those and also talking about some other recent research that we've been doing together. So as I mentioned, we've been collaborating for over 30 years. Here's just a little time mark to show our aging process. But we are both urban planners with a background in geoscience and have really been got into this field with an interest in geologic hazards and how we deal with them in the built environment. My experience has been both in research and actual management and planning pre- and post-disaster. And Rob, as Craig mentioned, is a professor emeritus of urban planning at the University of Illinois, but also has a practice background where he worked leading a geologic consulting firm for a period of time as well. So that I think we're pretty excited today to share how we think about the field, especially for geologists and geotechnical engineers and their work in post-disaster periods. So I'm going to turn it over to Rob at this point to just walk us through some of the basic observations that we want to share with you in thinking about the post-disaster period. Rob? Great. Thanks, Laurie. Again, it's great to be here today. And let's jump in. So the key, what really distinguishes disaster recovery from normal urban development is what we call time compression. And it's the compression of urban development activities in time and in the space of the disaster. And this is just a little conceptual diagram that reminds us that when we have a disaster, we lose everything right away. And so that's the structures, infrastructure, services, all that stuff goes away quickly, and it needs to all get put back much faster. And so if you think of normal urban development processes, we do all this much more gradually. And so it's this key fact that everything needs to happen quickly is really the key characteristic of post-disaster recovery. And there's a whole lot of characteristics of post-disaster recovery, but they are all different symptoms of time compression. So next. So time compression creates effects over space and over time. So over space, there are differential effects across the place of disaster. So, you know, the different things are coming back at different times. Some things might be moving to other places, and that make it physically different than other places in normal times in a variety of ways. Over time, different activities, for example, construction, communication, funding streams, retail, businesses, being able to start up, all of these things actually, they compress at different speeds, which creates sequencing and coordination challenges. So in addition to just this overall time compression, we sort of refer to this sequencing and coordination difficulty as time warping. And time compression, as I think you can imagine, creates both challenges as well as opportunities. Next. Just very quick overview of, you know, how this works. How does disaster recovery work in urban systems? Well, it's normally cities are built by many different actors. And by actors, we mean all different scales, individuals, organizations, governments, non-governmental organizations, and so on. And recovery is no different. So sometimes people think what we really need is some kind of a recovery czar. And that's not how we do things in normal times. We always have lots of different actors acting, and that's the way it is after disaster as well. But they're in time compression. So we think of it as a self-organizing system of mutually informed actors operating in compressed time. And we, you know, as a metaphor, we use this ecosystem of builders metaphor is often useful. So the key ingredients of recovery are information flows and money flows. So the information flows typically between actors, although sometimes from outside, and money flows from external sources. And these are the things that really that these are like the nutrients that feed the ecosystem of builders. But sometimes these flows are out of sync, which again, gives this a time warping. And again, there's a whole lot of manifestations of this that that we don't have time to go into right now, but we'll see them in the examples. So just the previous slide, I think I had right, yeah, so the right. So they have implications for the various actors. Okay, next slide. So one of those implications is that we need to deliberate and act simultaneously. Deliberation needs to begin right away while all the participants are acting. I'm sure we all know the metaphor, having to build the plane while flying it, which is not really desirable. But this is in fact, the way that we need to approach post disaster recovery. So basically, there's there's three major ways to be able to think and act at the same time. One of them is to increase knowledge. You do this by hiring more professionals involving more stakeholders. And basically, you're, you're flooding the system with information, you're overcompensating for for this warping by by just putting a lot more information to the system so that even though things are still going fast, you can be smarter. The second one is another way of doing that is decentralizing information and decision processes, so that a lot of different stakeholders can deliberate and act at the same time. So again, this is a way that we can keep going at at high speed, but but make that process more intelligent. But sometimes we can't really do it that effectively. So the third way is is we iterate by we act first on easier issues. And some things we can't really act that fast on so we can delay action for a few particularly troublesome areas. And then finally, in some particularly challenging situations, a spatial dispersion or relocation is an option, which is that that, you know, often is just easier to to to not rebuild things as they were, but to but to put stuff in other places. But this only works if certain conditions are met. Next. And so what are some of these challenges of relocation? I think really the main thing is that to understand that residents balance the hazard map against the other risks they face in their lives. And those are access to livelihoods, access to self health and other services. And, you know, really, often we we think of, you know, we we have the map that we create with the red zones and so on. And we think that people should not live in those areas. And most residents, they understand that, but they have to balance that against all the other risks they face. And as a result, after they do this balancing, many people prefer not to relocate at all. We need to remember the communities are social and economic networks. Sometimes we think of them as as just buildings or or infrastructure hardware physical things that we need to move. And and and indeed, those those are there and those are challenges. But even more challenging is is moving social and economic networks. And that's really what cities are the physical hardware is really just things that serve and enable those social and economic networks to work. related to this, residents also have cultural symbolic and emotional attachments to place that make them reluctant to move. And finally, I just want to remind everybody this is an important point that acceptable risk is a is a personal decision. So again, you know, we often will create a scientific hazard maps and and really any probabilistic maps are our scientific. But as soon as we put colors on those maps, and we decide what are the red zones, what are the orange zones, what are the green zones? We're we're putting our judgment into that we're we're doing using our definition of acceptable risk. And that may not be the same as the definition that individuals and communities use. And so that's it's all it's socially determined. And importantly, it also complicates these situations often is those feelings often change over time through the recovery process. Next. So we've gone through that quick overview, we're going to illustrate through a few examples. And let's move on to the first one. And when China. So I think many of you remember this magnitude 7.9, when shown earthquake in May of 2008, it was enormous, it affected 100,000 square miles. There were 87,000 fatalities. And initially, at least, it displaced nearly one and a half million people, which is, anyway, very, very significant disaster. Okay, next. So there was a three month reconstruction planning efforts. So they wanted to move quickly. And this is really an example of how to if you're moving quickly, how you can, you accelerate increasing knowledge. And so national agencies and provinces mobilized, mobilized literally thousands of professionals to do planning to do geologic investigation to do site and analysis, there was it was a really an unprecedented effort. And for there was three primarily affected provinces, they prepared a general reconstruction plan, and also had 10 specific topical plans within that. And they were able to release a comprehensive reconstruction plan for review on August 12. So basically three months after the event, which was a significant achievement and only done, because they really invested the entire nation invested in, in applying increased knowledge to this case. So next slide. So another notable aspect of this was the pairing system. And what this did is they, they paired Eastern provinces with wealthier Easter provinces with the there we go with the with the affected counties. So there was a one for one match one province to one county. And they were required to provide a certain amount of funding. But in addition to that, they brought personnel into it. So they had, you know, various government experts, their universities and so on. They really brought each province brought all the resources to bear on on working with that county. And so this both is a good is a really good example of decentralization as well as increased capacity and an apple and increased knowledge. And basically think of it is if you just had one pipeline coming from Beijing, to all of those affected counties, I would just there would it would just it would. Anyway, it would not flow as easily. But by decentralizing, we got a lot more different parties involved, and they could all work simultaneously on on rehabilitating all those different affected counties. Next. And this is just an example of the land suitability map that was developed for the reconstruction planning process. As a result of this, they identified two towns that they did recommend for relocation. Each one of those is a complicated story, but they did. They worked on both of those. Next slide. And this is just an example of this is a Bechuan, one of those two towns and had these two, two landslides. And they not only did they did they damage a lot of buildings and take lives, but they also at one point dammed up the river there, which caused flooding as well. Next. So this is so again, they went very fast. The two pictures on the top are the new town of Bechuan, which was approximately, I think, 25 kilometers away from the original town. And they built it within three years. And the photo on the bottom shows what it looked like in 2017. Next. But so this was an impressive effort, physical reconstruction in a really fast amount of time by applying the various principles that we talked about. And so this physical reconstruction was really a huge success. But again, they're think different things compressed differently in time, and they were able to apply all of their resources to the physical reconstruction. But the process did not really sufficiently emphasize economic recovery and livelihoods and or analysis of how to do economic recovery and livelihoods. And so as a result of both the tourism district, which was one part of the economic rebuilding, and the industrial park in New Bechuan, which is really where they intended to provide most of the jobs for the for the residents of the new city. Both of these were still mostly vacant as of my last visit there in 2017. The next example in Taiwan, Typhoon Morricot, which was in August of 2009. This was a enormous record breaking rainfall two to three meters of rainfall in four days. Most of this I think was in three days. And you can quickly do the math and and think about what what that might have done. It caused a lot of flooding, a lot of landsliding. Over 500,000 people were initially displaced. There were nearly 700 fatalities. And you can imagine all of the all of the many types of damage that occurred as a result of that next. And so there were, you know, again, a lot of people were initially displaced. And and a lot of landslides in the mountains. And there was a goal to provide permanent housing quickly and sort of in reaction to issues that Taiwan had had with temporary housing. After the Chishi earthquake of 1999, they decided to really accelerate this process and provide really try to reduce the amount of time spent in temporary housing and produce permanent housing as quickly as possible. And some of this was going to involve relocation because a lot of these villages up in the mountains were seriously damaged by landsliding. And to provide housing quickly, they would have to have to move them. And so they they instituted a process where they evaluated 291 sites. So these are places that both had landslides and had the potential to have future landslides from future typhoons. And they found 160 of them unsafe. And these were designated as in national law as special zones, and they required them to relocate. And just to give you an idea of the speed of this process. So in nine days in September, which was really shortly a month after the event, the government investigated 64 indigenous villages, determined 33 as unsafe, and 33 conditionally safe. And then for a month from November to December, they investigated 89 indigenous village and determined 60 of them to be unsafe. And this is both a positive and less positive example of bringing more knowledge to play. So they obviously had to mobilize a lot of people to be able to go out and investigate these places. But the investigations were were pretty fast. And and some of them, for some of the towns, they were really quite cursory. They just made visual investigations in a very brief amount of time, and made these really significant decisions as a result. And so there are both positive and negative results of this. So of the 19,000 residents in those special zones. So about 61 percent of them have actually relocated. And I'll get to that in a moment. And so they had so they had to build these relocation sites really quickly. They built 3559 housing units on 43 sites. And just to give an idea, the speed 47 of these were complete by the end of 2010. So that's like a year and a third after the typhoon, they had almost half of these relocation housing units were completed and ready for occupancy. And by the end of 2011, nearly 80 percent of them were complete. Next. And just I'll just one quick example so we could get an idea of what happened here. So this is in Taiwu Township. And you can see the original village site on top of the hill up in the mountains. And they could have their traditional lifestyles there. They grew coffee. And then they were moved really fairly close by the new location there down in the valley. So it's close by, which is great. But you can just see from from this view that is extremely different environment next. And again, on the left, you can see bits of the old town and the upper right, you could see the new. And in the lower right, what is that? That's a bus that the village owns. And what do they do with that bus? They go back and forth between the old site and the new site. So they didn't really, you saw that number earlier, that 61% of the people have actually relocated, which means a number of them are still living back in the in the original village site, even though it was mandatory relocation. And the reality is most of the villages involve some mix of either permanent relocation sometimes some individuals lived in both places. They conduct various levels of farming and tourism at the old village sites. And so despite this whole process, and the mandatory relocation, they're still basically living in both places. And this is really common in a lot of the situations we see elsewhere. Next, and now we're on to Laurie. Thanks, Rob. Yeah, I'm going to briefly talk about the New Zealand earthquake sequence of 2010 2011. While this is an image of the earthquake striking in the February 22 2011 event, there was actually a preceding event called the Darfield earthquake in September of 2010, that really started from a geological perspective, a number of activities. So just walk you through that real quickly. So here you see on the left just the migration of epicenters from west to east across what's called the Canterbury Plain, and the number of aftershocks that were associated with those main shocks of the sequence. And they during this time, there were repeated episodes of landslides, liquefaction and rockfalls, affecting over 50% of the built area of Christchurch with a tremendous amount of settlement, as well as lateral spread, so both horizontal and vertical components of land change. This resulted in 1000 building demolitions in the central business district as well as 15,000 damaged homes. And here's just some images of the impacts. And you can see a visual image of all the liquefaction happening, some of the rockfalls, and what that really looked like on the ground in some of the hardest hit neighborhoods, where really drainage was dramatically changed because of all of this differential settlement. So what happened? Well, at the time, the New Zealand earthquake commission is also is a estate, think of it like insurance, it's not exactly insurance, it's a it's kind of a social contract that provides for coverage for the first loss to residential houses in New Zealand. And it also has a component for land damage. This process was centralized at the time, where the EQC was in charge of all the adjusters for their policies and also the land damage assessment. And so they commissioned a firm to start that process. They did a very quick assessment stage one report came out in October of 2010. A second stage report came out in November of 2010. And then they actually started working on strategies for how to deal with the area wide damage that was experienced. And so what you see here in this middle picture is is what was being worked on in in the district just to the north of Christ Church City Council called Waimakariri district that in that top right image there had a lot of liquefaction and ground settlement problems as well. Where in that particular council, they were actually working through with extensive community engagement in developing a land remediation program in which they would create a set of temporary accommodations away from the areas that needed to be fixed. And they would phase the work that was being done. So the people people closest to the river were going to have the work done on their properties first. And they would leave while those repairs were being done live in the temporary accommodations. Then when their work was finished, the next phase would start and those people would leave while that work was being done, etc, etc. So they released that strategy in early June of 2011. And then two more earthquakes hit in the middle of June. And very shortly thereafter, the government said, we're not going to do this. We're not going to do this remediation kind of work with this kind of displacement. And really the issue was the uncertainty of the frequency and ongoing sort of, you know, just risk perception of these repeat episodes of liquefaction. And for the government being responsible for land damage costs, having to repair those and then possibly start repairs on the house, and then have to come back and do ground remediation again, became an untenable financial decision for option for them. And that is why the government opted to actually zone the areas of most heavily damaged that they've viewed needed area wide solutions in order to be repaired, and to offer a buy out. I'll talk a little bit more about the impacts of that. Also, the areas that weren't in the red zone, where there was a green zone where you could just basically move forward with your life, but there was also a yellow zone. And this is an example of that iteration, you know, so an area has now been declared red, and an area has been declared green. So those are easier to resolve to some extent. And the area that was harder to resolve got sub zoned, so to speak, into technical categories, where investigations in TC three, for example, technical category three, meant that there had to be an engineering design for that property. And you can see the number of houses in each of these categories. And this this really created another challenge for those for the one for the capacity of the engineering community to support what was going on in the evaluations of damage and repair designs for downtown buildings work now also in suit in looking at repair design line designs for these TC three and in some cases TC two properties. So it increased costs and time. And I just want to note, there's another really great example of increasing knowledge with the stronger Christchurch infrastructure rebuild team that was going on simultaneously. And this is where kind of the point that Tom, that Rob made about time warping comes into effect where you have one group working on infrastructure repairs, and they now need to as they've designed their plan, they now need to receive or did have to receive this information about the red zone and figure out how they were going to adjust their plan to meet that new policy decision. So this was an alliance that really sort of helped spread the risk, reduce the time from design to delivery by having teams already on board engaged in the design and planning the delivery and implementation simultaneously. They undertook over 700 projects to repair the basically what they call the horizontal infrastructure, the water, the wastewater, the stormwater, the roads, bridges and retaining walls, all within a five year program. As a result, some challenges or some things they had to give up along the way were enhancements that they that were initially proposed. And so there was definitely more modern materials used. There were some seismic improvements that we use, but but certainly some of the vision of the resilience and transformation of that infrastructure couldn't take place in such a compressed timeframe. And the residential red zone only had temporary restoration of services. So what are some of the outcomes of this? Well, this initial red zone really when the government made the policy, it was about not repairing the land damage to the residential houses that it was obligated to do. So there were initially just two buyout schemes for the residential land and the land and the structure of residences. But they there were a subsequent set of lawsuits because residential land any community, as you know, will have neighborhood serving commercial uses. There will be churches, schools, other lands within that zone. So the government was forced to actually offer and extend the buyout offers and develop policies for how to buy out vacant land, ensure commercial properties and some of these other uses that I described. Some property owners elected not to sell. And the infrastructure services had to be maintained, even if temporary to provide services to those individuals, although threats of decommissioning have persisted and probably will initiate in some of these areas soon. The complexity of the TC three foundation designs really affected the timing of the ability of those neighborhoods to recover property values were affected as a result, people didn't want to buy into a TC three neighborhood. And there was blight as these houses that abandoned for a number of years, while the design and the the insurers and everybody are involved in figuring out that solution. So some statistics there about also the fact that all of this differential settlement increased the vulnerability in some places for additional future liquefaction and also increased the vulnerability of flood risk. And the last thing, which is sort of thinking a little bit more broadly and longer term is just around the fact that there was all of this took place at a time when a whole bunch of people were coming to Christchurch to work on the rebuild, the houses, some houses were being bought out. So those people were looking for homes in competition with the workers who were looking for homes in competition with the people were having to move out for repair related work while their houses underwent that engineering designs and repairs. So this really constrained the housing market. It led to homelessness. It led to further displacement and led to price hikes that lasted over two years, both for rental and for sale properties until eventually new housing construction caught up and the repairs caught up. And the planning and reuse the amalgamation of rights when you have all of these different easements and things took a very long time to do. And that process of sort of figuring out the reuse even as park lands is still ongoing today. So now I'll just briefly talk about Japan as well. Let me do a time check. With the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami happened just not not even a month after the Christchurch earthquake of February 22nd. It was devastating to a huge region in Japan. I'm going to take you real quickly through an example of what that what that was like for one particular community, Rikus and Takata. It was a small community. You can just see the widespread devastation in the valley after after the tsunami. Well here we have a increasing knowledge example with also the goal of decentralization. So the government convened what it called a national reconstruction design council. It included planners, architects, engineers of various types to come together and put a strategy together for the rebuild sort of a set of guidelines for all of these different communities to use. And they actually came up with sort of what we call a two level approach for dealing with future risk. The first level was really that in the area where that was vulnerable to more of the probabilistic one in 100 year level tsunami would basically be we would remove all housing from that area. And so life safety was the goal in the 100 year zones. And then other the thousand year measures would be what were called more soft measures. But relocations up into the hills and and enhancing evacuation and other kinds of warnings for people that lived in those areas to make sure that they that life safety was protected there as well. So how did this work on the ground? Here's a plan for Rikuza Takada that showed basically a moving of everything up into the hillside areas and land raising down in the central part of that lower elevation that you saw in that aerial view earlier that had been so devastated with the construction of really significant seawalls at the front of the harbor. So here's an image of that lower area being cleared in 2012. Here's the massive land raising operation that was put in place where land to build the new hillside sites as it was being cleared and leveled was then that ground was pumped down to be put into the lower elevation area and raise that land up. And here you see just in 2021 so 10 years later that reconstruction of the seawall has now been completed but this is a very transformed community no longer seeing the coast as it had before and these are mostly fishing and rural coastal communities that really had a strong relationship and ties to the water that have been significantly transformed as a result of this policy. And here's just another view looking towards in that flat area and the issues of repopulation that left during all of this change has not necessarily come back it's an aging population in general and so there are social fabric and economic issues that are persisting and challenging that the recovery across the region but exemplified in this case as well. So now turning it back to Rob. Great thanks Laurie so I'm just going to give you just a little taste of one that we're currently working on. So this was a earthquake in September 2018 a magnitude 7.5 earthquake in Palo on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. And so it had very strong shaking but more importantly than that were really two key phenomena that happened. The first one was a tsunami in the bay that occurred with no warning and caused many facilities and it was some combination of the fault rupture and through the length of the bay as well as it triggered a lot of submarine landslides and so some combination of those things caused the tsunami to occur within just you know less than five minutes after the earthquake and so people had no time to get away. The second one was this really unprecedented liquid faction flow slides you know where again many fatalities here this happened in there were four or five really large areas where this occurred and it was sort of the the liquid faction liquid faction started and then the ground moved and it's basically level ground is 0.5 percent slope basically turned into liquid and and flowed which is a pretty dramatic occurrence and I think many of you many of you know of this and perhaps some were on the gear team that might have gone there afterwards. In any event so they were these two phenomena the tsunami the liquid faction that were both really unusual and and we still don't really completely know all the all the causes of them and they both cause many deaths next. So this poses real challenges for for reconstruction and recovery and so the unique aspects of this case and why we're really interested in it was the first one is that these hazards and either one of these would have made this a really interesting case but there are two of them here and they were both deadly which means when we think of all the things that might warrant relocation that having having something a phenomenon that you know that instantly occurs without any warning that kills people is usually the sort of thing that we would we would absolutely not want to anybody living in those locations so this argues very strongly for relocation but conversely their livelihoods specifically fishing and irrigated farming directly geographically directly coincide with these hazardous geographies so the fishing along the coast and irrigated farming is exactly you know where the liquid faction was and and it and it exacerbates it and so this sort of situation where livelihoods depend on location this usually weren't warrants some kind of onsite adaptation provided you know depends on what the risk characteristics are so and so in turn so we need to figure out what are the risk characteristics and for both of these phenomena the future risks remain unknown again for both of these now we know a lot more than we knew five years ago and again I think maybe some people listening have been involved in some of those but there is still no really complete consensus on the causes of either these or more importantly the future probabilities and so we really don't have the information we need to be able to either rebuild in place or to relocate or to move to the orange zones or the yellow zones or any of those other things on the map but time compression so I mean people need to they need to have their homes and livelihoods again so so they had to create a plan and they had to rebuild and compress time so there's a lot of challenges here and we're still we're working on this and it's it's stretching our minds it doesn't it it we're using this to really help to refine the theories the things that we we talked about at the beginning here and and and we are coming up with my think really helpful new ideas that are helping us to think not only about this case but about to expand our thinking on a lot of the previous cases so just a little flavor of our current research and I'll turn this back to Lori. Thanks Rob yeah so we'll just wrap up quickly here and go to some questions so some thoughts for your consideration as we close down our presentation reflect a set of core principles and all post-disaster work and these are I think different from maybe the way as technicians we often think about our principles and doing our work the first is the primacy of information just how important it is to get information out and get it out very broadly stakeholder involvement this doesn't mean necessarily just citizens stakeholders in the case of New Zealand and Japan and other places it also involves insurers it involves the structural engineers and the contractors there's just a whole number of people that are part of the process of recovery that need to be involved in these decisions and the last is transparency just very very important to be transparent with the work and I think we've seen some really good examples of that in these cases as well understand that a time-compressed environment process may be especially illogical and confusing and expect inefficiencies it is just what happens when we worked in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina we actually budgeted an equal amount and even more in the end for communication that we did for the actual technical work on the recovery plan for the city it just costs a lot to go fast we were trying to go fast in a four month time period and we needed to have lots of communication to do that you can manage the effects of time compression by doing the things that we laid out and essentially those are different approaches for planning and acting simultaneously increasing knowledge by having more professionals involved in the process decentralizing the information and decision processes and iterating by acting on the easier items first you can increase capacity that also provides that deliberation and knowledge and as we noted about transportation ultimately enhances speed and it also engenders trust and all those speeds in force and please remember that recovery should not be a race and now about relocation our views are that relocation of residents and communities should happen in when it's really focused on the public safety and welfare being at risk and only with full participation of residents you really through that process begin to understand the issues that we've tried to lay out here around livelihoods the relocation of access to resources like health schools etc and get a more comprehensive and preferred solution ultimately by having a bigger picture view than just focused on risk as Rob mentioned earlier recognizing that everybody is making their own risk decision and you and it really helps to have a engagement process and understanding the various needs and preferences if you clearly communicate options to people you can increase your influence with that persuasive trustful communication and we encourage people to use multiple methods it's just not in this kind of environment practical or useful to just or results in a good outcome by just publishing something on a web or in a federal register you really need multiple methods of engagement and lastly be aware of the context as we're trying to allude to here and illustrate here with these cases that there's a broader social historical and political context in every area that we work and seek opportunities and be alert to the possibility of being manipulated by powerful interests or just the you know the pressures of time compression as well so with that we're going to wrap up and we thank you for your time and now i'll turn it back to craig to lead us in q&a well rob lory thank you this was excellent information i suggest very useful hopefully the audience finds it that way as well we have several questions that i'd like to pose to you and maybe create some kind of conversation that will last hopefully beyond this particular event uh one i'll start with is on your concept of time compression that seems to be a great observation and principle to understand how do we educate people on this concept and what are methods that we can utilize to employ the concept lory i think maybe you addressed some of the part about employment but then maybe we could focus a little bit on how do we get the word out how do we educate people on how to do this yeah you know we have started in the united states we have the gear the geotechnical extreme event reconnaissance and that's now broadened with funding from the national science foundation for the science social or structural engineering social science a number of other years that now exist but there's something that kind of knits them together called a converge and that is really talked about sort of cross-cutting issues like ethics and disasters doing interviews with people making sure that people are understand safety and i think that the time compression is one of those issues as well that really could be ripe for that kind of training within the ear network and converge offering and you know we speak about it in our professional association work and you know i think that's just also where you know maybe the training that gear does when it recruits number new members to participate in reconnaissance and your eye and all the other entities could could provide some information as well so i i kind of smiled when you asked that question because that's what we're doing right here we do try to give talks on this to as many different audiences possible and we we use every opportunity possible to speak to planners and when we when we when we study disasters invariably they ask us to give a talk so they can learn about other cases and so we're we're we're carrying this everywhere everywhere we can all the right places as much as we can and i think you know so the the idea of time compression is important but the implications of it are really important and one of the things that i think we mentioned many times here was expanding the channels of information and and i think both of us mentioned that that costs that costs money you have to invest in it and so typically in recovery you know you're we're gonna budget you're gonna count you know how many how many buildings were lost and and you know when how much pavement needs to go back and so on and the budget is based on that but you've got a budget for these info for all kinds of things having to with information flows technical assistance planning all of those kinds of things and as lori mentioned sometimes that's going to cost even more than you know than that you know some of the technical things that you have to do and so that to me is is one of the big messages that we have to keep repeating and and i'm telling to this audience and maybe some of you will carry this message to other places i think that's interesting rob we are actually part of the answer to that question exactly that's good that's good it's staring us right in the face you mentioned gear and steer and the other reconnaissance teams but your your your research is focused more on the implementation of actual recovery can you explain the difference between what the scientific investigations that gear and steer uh and others like it undertake versus the recovery itself that you were getting at here i'll start out um gear having been on the advisory committee for gear for a number of years you know gear really began because of the need to capture perishable information uh and and do that before the recovery the repair the restoration processes start uh and that is uh you know in the spirit of which the the grant application was originally submitted to the national science foundation for gear and specifically is to allow the geotechnical community to come together have some decision-making process around the priorities and needs for an investigation in an area and be able to go out and and conduct that quickly and efficiently um what we study as you see is long term uh and i think uh there's you know really interesting project that rob and i co-led for for e-year either earthquake engineering research institute which is what was called a resilience observatory and the the the goal there was to really look at how do you observe resilience because really resilience is really a concept it's a benefit a dividend that's realized in the moment and after the moment of disaster um so we need to observe resilience over time uh so what it means in reconnaissance is not just looking at the things that got damaged but also looking and spending you know a lot of time looking deeply at the things that weren't damaged and why and making sure that the reconnaissance effort and and does that and um for the most part i think we do a pretty good job of that but then also documenting um the resilience benefits that don't happen just in that immediate moment of disaster they happen through redundancies and and you know the the rapidity planning and the rapidity uh at which restoration can occur uh and the transformation and adaptations that are made uh in that post disaster period so you know i think that it's it's extending our view from what we think about in that immediate reconnaissance to to sort of looking at immediate reconnaissance is laying the foundation for ongoing reconnaissance and that means we have to kind of shift our funding schemes as well for that because we really it is valuable to go back five years on and and look at the kinds of early decisions that are made and how they played out of time what were the cascading consequences what what changes had to be made you know to some of that early mapping um and insights that that you know were made in that early time compressed period yeah i'll just that pretty well covers about just add a couple of things yeah we we're really interested in looking at the context looking at sort of broadening the view of things over space over time um but but really importantly looking at um the decision processes and the effects of those decision processes because that's how we learn um for for future events and really focusing on the um the communities and the lives of the people so like as an infrastructure for example um focusing i mean the hardware is obviously really critically important but focusing more on the receiving end so people what kinds of services do people get from the infrastructure and how does that work and how does that affect communities as opposed to the focus on the hardware and then um you know lori mentioned this effort with eri and i do want to point out that um public case is directly um is is directly a result of that so um it was one year after the um one year after the event we went on a eri reconnaissance sort of one of one of the first ones where we're really doing this sort of resilient reconnaissance sort of view over time and as a result of that we we got some interest and have gotten some additional some research funding mostly through the japanese members of our team and we're continuing to look at it but that whole project was um was initiated by um by eri's interest in looking at this uh very good very interesting um we have a question here related to your your broad international work uh so what should engineers be thinking about when responding to disasters in different countries and cultures this is multi-part so let me hear it through or please hear it through does the political system in place affect how the disaster decisions are put into practice more authoritarian governance systems uh might be better able to execute their top down decisions whether the uh where one would expect a greater number of optical exchanges and iterations leading to less rapid recovery process i can repeat some of that if it's it was too long for you we were able to see it and thank you for that question you know i think what we what surprised rob and i when we wrote the book was uh the comparative analysis of the different governance structures and what some of the outcomes were and so while uh mention of chinese authoritarian system and new zealand had a very centralized process with a national department created there have been a lot of uh you know there were a lot of impacts from that as well because of um the the to some extent a lack of local experience that that a national government will have land use and you know actual construction and economies are often quite you know quite localized in terms of how they work especially uh you know at the community scale and so one uh the more centralized often uh the lack of insight there may be to really understanding you know the practicalities and the realities on the ground of how people live in their community and what's valuable to them uh so i think you know what we found though across all of these cases was that aspects of government um and how those were managed by government regardless of the political structure uh was really important um and consistent across these cases and think of them as four levers money obviously if a government has money you know that is a lever you can sort of feed into the system and fuel recovery and as Rob has been saying information is a second fuel for recovery but the other two things that are are levers that can that need to be pulled and that we're trying to kind of illustrate here is collaboration sort of that broader engagement uh in decision making you get better decisions when you hear uh more of the disparate views and have a better context and understand uh that you know the context the local context everything else that that i'm describing uh and the second one is managing time just recognizing that time is something that you can manage that it is it you know yes decisions and actions um and the pressure to make them quickly um you know exists post disaster but it's also you you know you can you can manage that the way we described but you can also slow it down take more time to deliberate when you need to so that you can speed up later uh and so thinking of time is some is similar to how you manage money and information uh and engagement um we saw that as being the success more than necessarily how centralized or decentralized it was it was really how those governing actors manage those four components that was a thorough answer i just i i thought it was a very astute question uh particularly with regard to um different kinds of political systems and the quick answer is yes they absolutely do affect it that's when we talk about the context is really important and um i i just want to say that authoritarian systems can um read reconstruct um faster um but that doesn't mean that they're necessarily providing a better recovery because again the um the community is made up of people and and social and economic networks and those to and to really um rebuild those networks um the people involved in those really need to be involved so so sometimes an authoritarian system can make it visually make it look like the reconstruction happened more quickly um but sort of the deeper aspects of recovery may actually be done more effectively in um systems that involve more community involvement all right so uh we're running short on time so this could be the last question i'm going to slightly twist what is is written here but um you gave lots of experience uh that you you've acquired over these different interviews and studies um are you finding that the the work that's being implemented is from the local knowledge or the reaching out a minimum across the country to acquire the knowledge they taiwan or china well china i'm thinking mostly in taiwan or even across the the uh the different parts of the world can you maybe add a little more insight than what you had on that particular issue so i'm not completely sure i have the question but but i'll say that places um uh you know so every every place again has a unique context unique history unique culture um and to some extent um really to a very great extent we need to leave the recovery decisions up to their hands because they know what works for them but they haven't they haven't had an experience of a catastrophic disaster before and there's a lot of things that they can learn and that they do learn from the other places that have been that have been through this and you know some days we struggle with this issue of um you know every every disaster is unique and it's unique to its circumstances um so that would suggest that we can't learn from other places but absolutely we do it's it's really amazing i think lori is lori mentioned um even in really dramatically different political systems different cultures and very far-flung parts of the world human beings collectively really and individually they have the same concerns the same issues and there's there's an enormous amount of lessons that we learned from one place that applies to everywhere else okay lori gives that the thumbs up so i give rob the last word great thank you if i didn't explain it well but rob you did an excellent job of providing the information that i was hoping you would bring forward when i asked the question so good i'm glad yeah i think we were go ahead i just say just you know there are like capacity issues on a technical level and i think there's been some great examples where international uh advisors have been engaged with uh with local uh local technical experts geologists engineers etc and and those are the cases we try to really call out and highlight you know is really that you're building that capacity in that in that impacted country to to manage the decision making process not having outsiders come in and do it for them okay well at this point uh i think we need to go ahead and uh wrap up so i'll start by thanking everyone for joining and listening to lori and rob i want to give special thanks to lori and rob you did an excellent job of sharing some very useful and valuable information to this group i want to thank kaga and the national science foundation for sponsoring this and of course national academies uh and then lastly just remind you of our disclaimer that the opinions conclusions recommendations is so on expressed are those of the individuals and not of the national academy of sciences and that lastly the webinar will be posted online and information will be sent out when it is available so with that i again thank you all and i conclude this webinar