The objective of this award is to organize and conduct a workshop for NSF-supported Rapid Response Research (RAPID) awardees to identify themes and directions for research programs resulting from their investigations of the 2010 and 2011 New Zealand earthquakes and the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The two-day workshop will be held at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, in 2012. Workshop participants will identify major lessons and opportunities for further research across a range of disciplines, including topics that are cross-disciplinary in nature. Recommendations from the workshop will be shared widely with the broader research and practicing earthquake engineering community in a workshop report disseminated through the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) website (www.eeri.org) and EERI's monthly newsletter. This award is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP), and the workshop report will also be posted on the NEHRP web site (www.nehrp.gov).
The New Zealand and Japan earthquakes and tsunami present major learning opportunities for the U.S. research community. The complex nature of these events and resultant disasters provide major lessons and research opportunities across many disciplines. These recent earthquakes and tsunami are among the most significant and relevant events for the U.S. earthquake engineering community in the last several decades. Building codes in both countries are similar to those in the United States for concrete and steel buildings; there are many strong motion records (especially in Japan) that provide valuable data; the geologic setting and tsunami vulnerability for Japan are similar to the Pacific Northwest Cascadian subduction zone; there are similarities and lessons from the transportation, lifelines, and critical facilities sectors; and there are similar social and political issues in the response and recovery. This workshop will provide the mechanism to collect and synthesis observations from the numerous NSF-supported RAPID field studies to identify research needs for earthquake mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery to make the United States better prepared for future disasters.
On February 9 and 10, 2012, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) convened a workshop with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to identify themes and directions for research resulting from the September 4, 2010 and February 22, 2011 New Zealand earthquakes and the March 11, 2011 Great East Japan offshore earthquake and tsunami. All three earthquakes present major learning opportunities for the engineering and scientific research communities. These events are unique for the research community, in terms of both the unprecedented amount of data that are available from the events and what the data tell us. This uniqueness spans the concentrated, well-documented events in a major city in New Zealand to the truly complex and wide-spread event in Japan that included the earthquake (ground shaking, ground failure), tsunami, fires and nuclear incident with simultaneous and interacting effects and responses. The catastrophic and complex nature of these events and the non-linearity associated with such catastrophe hold important research implications. Data need to be examined and integrated across disciplines to truly understand the engineering, scientific, social and political consequences of catastrophe. These events highlight the clear need and unique opportunity to carry out broadbased programs of coordinated and collaborative basic research to evaluate the vulnerability of large urban areas to potentially catastrophic natural events, and then importantly, how to improve their resilience. The workshop steering committee identified key research themes and key recommendations, which are listed here and explored in more detail in the full workshop report, available at www.eeri.org/wp-content/uploads/JAPAN_NZ_RAPID_Workshop_Final.pdf. The enormous amount of data generated by these events, and the opportunity to analyze such data are the foundation for the key research themes that emerged from workshop discussions. Understanding key components of resiliency Understanding the established and emerging role of information technology in mitigation and response Understanding the many-dimensioned implications of the radiological disaster Understanding socio-economic consequences of such catastrophic events Key recommendations for future research, building from the unique, unprecedented opportunities presented by these events include: Support perishable data collection Establish an interdisciplinary digital data center Advance modeling, computational, and analytic capabilities Support a holistic research program on vulnerability and resilience that integrates many disciplines and researchers, across the three countries These themes and recommendations are all explored in more detail in the full report. In addition, the workshop presentations, reports from each break?out group and this report are all available at the workshop website: www.eeri.org/japan?new?zealand?nsf?rapid?workshop/.
