EAGER: Operationalization of the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network

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Over 39 percent of the US population live in coastal shoreline counties exposed on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts to meteorological hazards like hurricanes and on the Pacific Coast to geophysical hazards like earthquakes and tsunamis. Meanwhile, much of the remaining population at the interior of the country is subject annually to the damaging effects of thunderstorm downbursts and tornadoes, in addition to the looming threats of potentially catastrophic earthquakes. Concentrating property and human life in some of the country's most hazard-prone areas inevitably results in catastrophic losses, as powerfully illustrated by the 2017 Hurricane season's sequence of Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which caused the highest insured losses ever. Each disaster provides an important opportunity to evaluate the performance and vulnerabilities of buildings and other constructed civil infrastructure that led to dramatic losses of life and property. Research (knowledge) advances to reduce risks to civil infrastructure from natural hazard events are strongly guided and informed by field evidence documenting the performance of the built environment after the event. As natural disasters occur with little warning, reconnaissance teams must immediately mobilize over large geographical areas to gather large quantities of perishable research data on civil infrastructure performance that must be effectively captured through a finite number of field observations. While the National Science Foundation uses the Grants for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) funding mechanism to support structural engineering researchers to collect post-event perishable data, the response of the structural engineering community to such extreme events has been ad hoc, leading to slowed in-field response times, uncoordinated data collection, and missed opportunities to maximize learning from disasters. This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) responds to this challenge by establishing the Structural Extreme Event Reconnaissance (StEER) network to coordinate the structural engineering research community's rapid response to natural disasters and build its capacity for more effective, systematic, and consistent post-disaster RAPID reconnaissance and data collection. The goal is to use the event data collected for subsequent research investigations to reduce risks to constructed civil infrastructure and thus promote national welfare and prosperity by saving lives and reducing property losses in future disasters. This EAGER will guide the community-led design and launch of the StEER network and establish its mission to (1) promote community-driven standards, best practices, and training for coordinated RAPID field work, (2) represent the vision of the structural reconnaissance community outwardly to other aligned organizations, and (3) coordinate official event responses in collaboration with other stakeholders. StEER will be founded upon regional nodes that provide convening points to give voice to the needs of the windstorm and earthquake engineering communities, while establishing common ground to foster interaction between them. These nodes more importantly will enable swift and cost-effective response to disasters. Creating a single point of coordination for the structural engineering research community will also enable better connectivity with the wider established extreme events (EE) consortium in geotechnical engineering and social sciences to foster greater potentials for truly interdisciplinary reconnaissance. StEER will be operationalized through the following objectives: (1) establish its governance structure, policies and data standards to enable more effective, coordinated field reconnaissance by leveraging its geographically distributed network; (2) implement standard workflows for a wide array of assessment technologies to swiftly and reliably capture, curate and disseminate large volumes of perishable research data; (3) increase the community's capacity for high-quality damage assessments through standardization, rigorous quality assurance, and web-based training programs; (4) foster greater collaboration across hazard and disciplinary boundaries through coordination and blended reconnaissance efforts within the wider EE consortium; and (5) promote broad dissemination of high-quality reconnaissance findings to diverse audiences to benefit researchers, practitioners, students, and the public-at-large. StEER will also coordinate its reconnaissance with the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) RAPID facility and its data archiving with the NHERI cyberinfrastructure Reconnaissance Portal (https://www.DesignSafe-ci.org).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.