The Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network , whose mission is to deepen the structural natural hazards engineering (NHE) community’s capacity for reliable post-event reconnaissance, has released a Preliminary Virtual Assessment Team (P-VAT) Report for the November 30, 2018, Alaska Earthquake. Of particular note is the collaboration with the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), joint publishers of this document which integrates the narrative report of the StEER Virtual Assessment Team with the briefing prepared by EERI’s Virtual Earthquake Reconnaissance Team (VERT). The full EERI VERT Briefing is included as an appendix to this report and cross referenced throughout.
This report gathers this wealth of publicly-available information, (i) overviewing the hazard characteristics event, (ii) summarizing the preliminary reports of damage to wide-ranging of infrastructure, (iii) presenting data from instrumented structures, (iv) enhancing situational awareness to guide subsequent reconnaissance missions, and (v) fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange between StEER and EERI. The P-VAT report represents the first product of StEER’s larger coordinated response to this event, informing and supporting other research teams seeking to learn from this disaster.
Professor Khalid Mosalam, StEER co-PI and Associate Director for Seismic Hazards, leads StEER’s Pacific Regional node and serves as primary liaison to the Earthquake Engineering community. Mosalam is also Director of PEER, headquartered at UC Berkeley. Professor Mosalam noted that "the collaboration amongst the earthquake engineering community harnessed by PEER, EERI, and StEER was especially effective at gathering and coordinating relevant information in a very short period of time. Significant contributions to the report were made by UC Berkeley CEE graduate students."
This P-VAT report as well as all StEER reports are posted on the NHERI Designsafe Data Depot at https://www.designsafe-ci.org/data/browser/public-search/?query_string=steer