The two-day technical program on Wednesday, April 10 and Thursday, April 11 will feature five plenary sessions (including the EERI Awards Ceremony), 16 special sessions, 2 poster sessions, and a special programming track on the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes organized in partnership with NEHRP.

View a list of sessions and session descriptions here.

See below for plenary and special session descriptions.

Reconnaissance, Response, and Recovery: Lessons Learned from the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquake Sequence

This plenary session opens the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes Anniversary Program Track at 2024AM, organized in partnership with the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program. The M7.8 and M7.7 earthquakes that struck southern Turkey on February 6, 2023 affected a wide region of southern Turkey and northern Syria, killing nearly 60,000 people and damaging or destroying hundreds of thousands of buildings in more than 10 major cities. In this plenary, speakers from Turkey and the United States will present a multidisciplinary overview of the response to these earthquakes, the ongoing recovery process, and the lessons learned for earthquake risk and resilience in the region and beyond. Speakers will address topics including the coordination of the international earthquake reconnaissance response, the structural engineering impacts and what they mean for building codes and retrofit standards, and the social and economic impacts of the earthquakes as they relate to business resilience and gender, and the temporary rehousing and long-term rebuilding process.

Speakers will include: 

• Alper İlki, Istanbul Technical University, "Structural Engineering Lessons from the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes"

• Recep Cakir, Washington Geological Survey, “AFAD-Earthquake Clearinghouse established following the 6 February 2023 Mw7.8 and M7.6 Kahramanmaras Earthquakes ,Turkiye: Examples of Clearinghouse Management, Data Collection and Partnership Communications"

• Cynthia Kroll, LFE Business Resilience Subcommittee, Anne Wein, U.S Geological Survey, and Ezgi Orhan, Cankaya University, “Beyond Building Damage: Business Resilience Following the 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquake Sequence”

• N. Emel Ganapati, Florida International University, "Displacement, Housing, and Recovery after the 2023 Kahramanmaras Earthquakes" 

Welcome and Opening Plenary 

Advancing Seismic Resilience in the US Pacific Northwest and Beyond

The Pacific Northwest is susceptible to numerous seismic hazards and their cascading downstream impacts to the built and living environments. Although earthquake risk mitigation has been ongoing in the region for decades, efforts to advance earthquake science, engineering, and policy have gained new momentum in recent years. The Opening Plenary session will feature keynotes by local and national leaders in the effort to build seismic resilience in Washington State and beyond. Speakers will discuss the significant advancements the region has made in areas such as conducting seismic retrofits and developing URM risk reduction strategies, and highlight the next steps for future action. The session will close with a welcome from the EERI President and Organizing Committee Chairs with an introduction to the week ahead. Speakers will include: U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal (by video), Washington State Representative Cindy Ryu, Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Director Harold Tobin, and Washington Geological Survey Chief Hazards Geologist Corina Allen, City of Seattle Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe, and Oral Historian with the Muckleshoot Tribe, Warren KingGeorge.

Pramila Jayapal, U.S. Representative

Elected in 2016, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is now serving her fourth term in Congress representing Washington’s 7th District. Congresswoman Jayapal is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, where she serves as Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. She also serves on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. She is the Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which represents nearly 50% of the entire Democratic caucus; the Immigration Task Force for the Congressional Asian Pacific Asian Caucus; and a Vice Chair of the Congressional LGBTQ Equality Caucus where she is the co-chair of the Transgender Equality Task Force. Prior to serving in elected office, Congresswoman Jayapal spent twenty years working internationally and domestically in global public health and development and as an award-winning national advocate for women’s, immigrant, civil, and human rights.

Cindy Ryu, Washington State Representative

Rep. Cindy Ryu is serving her 7th term in the Washington State House of Representatives. While a Shoreline City Councilmember, she served as Mayor, becoming the first Korean American woman mayor in America. Rep. Ryu chairs the Innovation, Community & Economic Development and Veterans Committee, with jurisdiction over community development; community investment programs; and underrepresented communities. She also serves on Appropriations and Consumer Protection & Business committees and is a Washington Tourism Marketing Authority Board Member. In Shoreline, she served as president of both the Shoreline Chamber of Commerce and its Dollars For Scholars Chapter, and helped improve numerous public parks, build its first City Hall and create Shoreline’s Green Business Program. She is also US Vice Chair of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region.

Harold Tobin, Pacific Northwest Seismic Network Director

Harold Tobin holds the Paros Endowed Chair in Seismology and Geohazards in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, where he is the Director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. He is also the designated Washington State Seismologist. His research involves the study of tectonic plate boundaries with a focus on how faults work and the conditions inside them that lead to earthquakes. He is especially interested in subduction zones, where the planet’s largest earthquakes and tsunamis take place. Tobin’s research has taken him to Japan, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Alaska, and Barbados, as well as the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Oregon, and he is an international leader in scientific applications of deep drilling.

Corina Allen, Washington Geological Survey Chief Hazards Geologist

Corina Allen is the Chief Hazards Geologist at the Washington Geological Survey, where she manages the earthquake, tsunami, and volcanic hazards section of the Survey. She and her team work on understanding earthquake and tsunami hazards and communicating their modeling, research, and evacuation maps to emergency managers, policy makers, and the public so that they can make informed decisions. She has also performed geothermal research and mapping. Her research background is in structural geology and field geology.

Marco Lowe, City of Seattle Chief Operating Officer

Chief Operating Officer Marco Lowe is responsible for City functions and programs and the day-to-day tasks needed for operating the city. Lowe previously led teams in government and the private sector to improve affordability for housing in King and Snohomish counties and is an adjunct professor at Seattle University’s Institute of Public Service. He will focus on driving efficiencies in Seattle’s public utility agencies, making Seattle government more transparent and accountable, and streamlining housing and infrastructure construction. Lowe has a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington. He looks forward to overseeing essential city operations and functions to better serve every resident.

Warren KingGeorge, Oral Historian with the Muckleshoot Tribe

Warren KingGeorge is the Oral Historian with the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe’s  Preservation Department. His primary responsibilities are to collect and record oral history from Tribal and Community Members, on topics ranging from hunting, fishing and clamming stories on the Puget Sound to the oral tradition of earthquake recurrences in the region. He works with various government agencies to ensure Treaty Right access and to create management plans to maintain and enhance our valuable cultural resources. Additionally, he works with museums, colleges and private collectors on repatriation of ancestral remains and artifacts.

 

2024 William B. Joyner Lecture

Why Seismic Hazard Modelling Has Become a Risky Business

Helen Crowley, Secretary-General, Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation; Editor, Earthquake Spectra

Abstract: The Joyner Lecture honours the distinguished career of William B. Joyner at the U.S. Geological Survey and his abiding commitment to continuing communication and education at the interface between research findings of earthquake science and the practical realities of earthquake engineering.

One such interface that has been the source of much debate in recent years relates to the use of probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) models as the basis for seismic design and assessment. Since the publication of the landmark paper by Cornell in 1968, PSHA has become the standard approach for defining the seismic actions in design codes. Before then, following the Messina (Italy) earthquake in 1908, seismic zonation maps based on observed macroseismic intensity from past earthquakes were used to define where, and to what level, buildings should be designed to withstand the lateral forces from earthquakes. These zonation maps were often, and somewhat inevitably, updated after damaging earthquakes.

Despite the clear improvements that the use of a PSHA-based approach brought, criticism was frequently placed on the outputs of these models, such as when the ground motions from earthquakes were seen to exceed those underlying the design code, suggesting a widespread misunderstanding of the meaning of the latter. Since the 2000’s, there has been a move towards explicitly discussing the levels of risk that are being accepted by the code, together with the consequences expected under the design levels. This has led, in the United States, to the adoption of the so-called risk-targeted approach for defining the seismic actions, which aims at harmonising the probability of collapse of buildings across the region of interest. This methodology has not yet been widely adopted by design regulations in other parts of the world, though in Italy, for instance, a significant effort has been made to evaluate the underlying spatial variation of risk to buildings designed to the latest standards. Whilst a more explicit recognition of the level of risk associated with seismic design codes has been an important step forward in Italy, the latest update to the PSHA model, developed in 2019 by the Italian Geological Survey (INGV), has continued to receive criticism and has even been rejected as the basis for an update of seismic actions in the design code. In this lecture, the argument will be made that the onus should now be on structural engineers to demonstrate the impact of these changes in terms of the levels of risk to the building stock, and how resilience has been, and can continue to be, built into the code to accommodate such changes resulting from advances in earthquake science.

EERI Distinguished Lecture

Geospatial Technology – Saving the World's Past, Present, and Future from Natural Hazards

Dr. Michael Olsen, Professor, School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Oregon State University; Technical Director, NSF Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) RAPID Facility; Director of the Cascadia Lifelines Program (CLiP)

Abstract: The task of maintaining resilient infrastructure against the onslaught of natural hazards often feels elusive and unattainable. Recent advances in technology offer promising solutions and opportunities towards this goal; however, the effective adoption and utilization of those technologies operates at a much slower pace given the societal realities of budget limitations, workforce shortages, polarization of priorities, disillusionment from past failures, and resistance to change. In day to day operations, efforts by engineers, planners, and decision makers often are stymied due to a lack of accessible, trustworthy, and current information related to infrastructure conditions. These problems are exacerbated in emergency situations where infrastructure systems and people are pushed to extreme limits.

At the project scale, inadequate site investigations result in substantial delays and cost-overruns from unanticipated problems during construction as well as poor infrastructure performance due to ground failure during a seismic event. These challenges propagate to the network scale where entities managing lifelines are often forced to make decisions prioritizing mitigation efforts based on limited, simplistic, or outdated information, which significantly hampers response and recovery efforts during a disastrous situation. This presentation explores examples of how expanded and effective usage of geospatial technologies now can help us proactively “save” the world through detailed mapping of our critical lifeline infrastructure to improve 1) monitoring, modeling, and analysis efforts to more precisely identify vulnerable infrastructure, 2) planning for and understanding the potential impacts and damage extents associated with multiple hazards, 3) the conduct of post-disaster reconnaissance, damage assessments, and rebuilding efforts, and 4) digital preservation of infrastructure and other resources with significant cultural and historical importance that are unlikely to withstand major seismic forces lurking on the horizon. Ultimately, geospatial technology serves as the unifying glue to enable meaningful collaboration between science, engineering, and public policy necessary for a resilient society capable of effectively responding and adapting to natural hazards.