Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER): Data to Knowledge Framework for Coordinated Reconnaissance following Natural Hazard Events

Natural hazard events, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes, can claim irreplaceable lives and cause billions of dollars in damage to communities nationwide, with cascading impacts on the U.S. economy as well as the security and well-being of its citizenry. Unfortunately, these losses are only mounting. Reducing the toll of disasters depends critically upon engineers systematically documenting hazard impacts on the built environment and ensuring the resulting knowledge swiftly informs new regulatory policies and construction practices guiding more resilient recovery and rebuilding.

This award will expand the role of the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network in these efforts to learn from natural disasters. This project will streamline the network’s core operations, supporting volunteer engineers as they collect and process valuable post-disaster data. In parallel, this project will develop new protocols for more efficient data collection and processing as well as knowledge dissemination to constituencies in research, policy, and practice.

These protocols will broaden the participation of the research community, including undergraduate students, while building their capacity for high-quality forensic data. The research community will further benefit from the resulting Science Plan that ensures post-disaster observations inform future research and its translation into policy and practice.

By more effectively utilizing the opportunity to not only learn but act upon the knowledge gained in the study of disasters, this project will help communities to become more resilient and sustainable. This project will contribute to the National Science Foundation (NSF) roles in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program (NWIRP).

This project will develop new protocols that enhance the StEER network’s efficiency, achieved through the outputs of six interconnected objectives, beginning with: (1) a tiered, regional data collection model for more agile field responses, (2) a workflow that unifies structural assessments across hazards and building typologies, (3) new capacities for automated data collection and synthesis, and (4) a damage quantification scheme offering more objective evaluations of performance compatible with established rating systems. Outputs of these four objectives will enhance the network’s core operations to lessen data collection/processing demands, increase efficiency, and reduce latency.

This in turn will enable the network’s members to direct more energy toward in-depth forensic evaluations, feeding this learning into new dissemination conduits, formed through the addition of (5) a constituent-focused reconnaissance engagement and communications hub. This is coupled with (6) observation-driven science planning that links the network’s findings to research and technology transfer opportunities.

In total, this will result in a more coherent natural hazards engineering research agenda and ultimately will help translate next-generation mitigation strategies into practice. Project data will be archived and made publicly available in the NSF-supported Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Data Depot (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.