Circular 1242
NEHRP supports investigations of foreign earthquakes because they often provide special opportunities to validate models and to learn about both the performance of specific aspects of the built environment and the geologic and seismologic processes that will have implications for earthquake risk mitigation in the United States. Cost and logistics generally limit the size of NEHRP foreign postearthquake investigations. Federal agencies generally do not participate unless officially invited by the impacted country. These factors cause tremendous differences in the character of individual investigations. At one extreme, investigations are modest and limited to small EERI reconnaissance teams, as for example, with the 1992 Erzincan, Turkey, earthquake. At the other end of the spectrum, affected foreign governments request U.S. assistance and these investigations have foreign policy implications, as with the 1988 Armenia, USSR, 1995 Kobe, Japan2, and 1999 Kocaeli, Turkey, earthquakes. In the latter situation, some of the investigating teams are representatives of the U.S. Government while others, who are not covered by the request, are independent.
Failure to coordinate schedules of field teams may lead to interference with the work of local experts and is the principal operational issue for NEHRP-supported foreign deployments. U.S. institutions typically respond independently in the earth sciences, engineering, and social sciences. Field parties supported by the EERI Learning from Earthquakes Program, the three earthquake engineering research and education centers (MAE, MCEER, and PEER), SCEC, CERI, IRIS, UNAVCO, as well as individuals with small NSF grants for exploratory research SGER) may all visit earthquake-damaged areas with Federal funding support. In addition, the USGS, NIST, private firms from both the U.S. and foreign countries, and research entities from foreign countries commonly deploy field teams. The uncoordinated deployment of U.S. citizens has prompted complaints by affected countries to the U.S. Department of State. In its recent award to EERI for the Learning from Earthquakes Program, the Civil and Mechanical Systems directorate of NSF requested that EERI coordinate investigators funded by that directorate. In investigations in Turkey in 1999 and India in 2001, EERI has increasingly served as a point of contact for foreign post-earthquake investigations. This plan recommends that NEHRP expand this EERI role. This plan recommends that each NEHRP agency request all of its post-earthquake investigators to inform EERI of plans and schedules of their investigations before departure as well as their ongoing status once they are in the field. EERI shall report these planned activities and their status regularly to the NEHRP agencies and post this information on its Web site. Because authority to influence schedules rests with the NEHRP funding agencies, the agencies shall review proposed plans for their potential impact on the proposed country.
Although it is beyond the scope of the NSF mandate to EERI, this plan encourages EERI to keep local technical and scientific personnel abreast of U.S. activities, to involve them in these activities where possible, and encourage them to communicate relevant findings directly to the government of the country affected by the disaster. These communications from local personnel may be useful for reconstruction as well as encourage mitigation of future losses.
It is noted that EERI in its Learning From Earthquakes Proposal to NSF has strengthened the coordination role of the EERI Team Leader and group leaders for each of the disciplines. In the field they solicit cooperation with other investigators. In preparing the preliminary and final EERI reports, they solicit and coordinate contributions from others who participated in field investigations. The EERI Team Leader also plays a significant role in helping to coordinate the second phase of data collection by making contact with each of the investigative teams before they enter the field and maintaining contact with them during field investigations by e-mail and phone. The EERI Team Leader offers to direct these investigators to areas that require further investigation before perishable data are lost. The approach allows researchers to collect data in several waves, improving the comprehensiveness of the documentation of earthquake impacts. Coordinating field investigations and drawing on contributions from other teams ensures a clear understanding of damage and impacts, less duplication, less disruption of local emergency response and research efforts, more effective utilization of limited research funding, and a more comprehensive report on the earthquake. The EERI post-earthquake investigation plan is shown in figure 3.
U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey
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