News

Bruce L. Kutter, Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Davis, was awarded the ASCE H.

PEER has continuing funding from the State of California related to the seismic performance of transportation systems. This funding supports the Transportation Systems Research Program (TSRP), the purpose of which is to lessen the impacts of earthquakes on the transportation systems of California, including highways and bridges, port facilities, high-speed rail,  airports, and other related structures.

The PEER Annual Meeting 2020 with the theme of “The Future of Performance-Based Natural Hazards Engineering” was held on January 16 & 17, 2020. Please see the summary of first two plenaries here. The afternoon of Day 1 focused on Modeling & Simulation.

PEER Hub ImageNet (Φ-Net or PHI-Net/ is a general automated framework (see figure) for vision-based structural health monitoring (SHM) and rapid damage assessment after disasters. Based on past reconnaissance efforts and related studies, Φ-Net represents the vision-based detection tasks by a tree-like hierarchy framework.

The PEER Annual Meeting 2020 with the theme of “The Future of Performance-Based Natural Hazards Engineering” was held on January 16 & 17, 2020. Tsu-Jae King Liu, Dean of Engineering at UC Berkeley, opened the meeting highlighting the contributions of PEER since its inception 23 years ago.

PEER has just published Report No. 2019/07: "PEER Hub ImageNet (Ø-Net): A Large-Scale Multi-Attribute Benchmark Dataset of Structural Images." It was authored by Yuqing Gao and Khalid M. Mosalam.

Visit the PEER publications page to download a free color pdf of the document.

Abstract

The Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network has issued an Event Briefing for the November 26, 2019 M6.4 earthquake in Albania. Event Briefings  are typically released within 48 hours of an event for which StEER will not deploy virtual or field assessment teams, but still warrants some commentary.

PEER has been endorsed as an Affiliate organization of QuakeCoRE, New Zealand Centre for Earthquake Resilience. This endorsement was recently confirmed by the Directors and Board of QuakeCoRE.

An agreement of academic collaboration has been signed between PEER and the following five Japanese research institutions:

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has joined PEER as an educational affiliate. CMU faculty have expertise mutually beneficial to the PEER community in the following topics:

  • post-earthquake building damage diagnosis and loss estimation

Key Lessons

❏   At the end of October, three significant fires took place in California, namely the Kincade Fire in Northern California and the Tick and Getty fires in Southern California, fueled by high speed winds with heated air blowing from inland to the ocean. California Governor Gavin Newsom declared statewide emergency due to fires and extreme weather conditions (CA Gov, 2019). PG&E shut down power for an estimated 2.35 million people across 38 counties at the same time increasing the severity of the situation.