IT TAKES A DISASTER: LEVERAGING CATASTROPHES AS A NECESSITY TO ACHIEVE SEISMIC RESILIENCE

“Earthquake Engineering” is a fascinating journey deep into many aspects of human nature. Technical solutions to provide life safety and/or full post-earthquake functionality exist. However, in spite of the best (and outstanding) work of many engineers, the myth/fallacy is to believe the world will adopt these solutions and that therefore, seismic resilience will occur. An earthquake engineer is tasked to design infrastructure to survive earthquakes, but such efforts often require engineers, architects, social scientists, public policy experts, political scientists and even the public— all with clashing priorities — to agree on a common objective when a consensus often does not even exist within a single one of these groups. Trying to make this happen is moving on a path that inevitably connects with the multiple facets of human nature — from the captivating ones to the crazy ones. This can’t be modeled – just like agent-based modelling is unable to predict a bank-run or a recession. As such, large-scale catastrophes have the potential to change momentum, and can serve as an effective evolutionary process towards more resilient society if lessons can be learned from these disasters – and earthquake engineers can play a critical role in this scenario.