Engineers for a Sustainable World: Padang reconnaissance
After travelling for 36 hours halfway across the world from San Francisco to Padang, Indonesia, I wearily walked past the collapsed wing of the Hotel Inna Muara and into a make shift hotel lobby where I met Greg Deierlein , 4 recent Stanford alumni, and the rest of the EERI reconnaissance team. This was my first exposure to Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW). All four Stanford alums had participated in ESW’s Seismic Mitigation and Tsunami Evacuation Project in Padang. They explained to me some of the work that they had done for the Project earlier in the year: seismic building evaluations, on-site building investigations, nonlinear modeling, tsunami evacuation route development, identification of tsunami evacuation structures, and some other tasks that I can’t remember. Now they were back in Padang to review their analyses after the earthquake and to determine new opportunities that future Project teams could apply their skills to further seismic and tsunami risk mitigation. I was completely amazed. Only a handful of structural engineers ever get to see the structures that they designed or evaluated actually go through a design level earthquake – and here are four young engineers doing just that!
A few months later I visited the current Stanford students working on the next phase of the Padang ESW Project in Palo Alto. They shared with me the lessons they learned from the reconnaissance team and several new ideas that they were working on. Our conversations ranged from determining probabilistic seismic demands to realistic construction detailing to the political implications of various projects. Clearly the students were having fun – and even got to feel the satisfaction that what they were working on might have a real impact. But what I was most impressed with was the fact that the students were looking at the whole picture. They not only addressed specific issues, but also asked questions and evaluated how those issues affected each other: How could you apply western technical analyses with construction methods and materials in Indonesia? What are the cost implications of different designs and are they worth it? How do you incentivize private and public entities to mitigate risk? Most of students in the Program are not going to ever visit Padang and may not ever work on a similar project in the developing world. But the skills they learned from trying to teach a developing society about seismic risk mitigation are just as applicable to convincing the Board of Directors of a healthcare network or the CEO of a high-tech company in the developed world that seismic risk mitigation is a good idea for them too. It would have been nice to have ESW at my alma mater…
