Engineering and Risk Active

Sources/Usage: Public Domain.

The Engineering and Risk Project (ERP) is part of the Hazards, Impact, and Risk (HIR) sub-committee of Science Coordination Committee (SCC) of the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program (EHP). Two ERP tasks are currently identified to extend hazard science to engineering mitigation and risk reduction (i.e., improve ability of built environment to resist hazards). They both have research and outreach elements and are consisted of:  

Task 1: Collaboration with external engineers and National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) project on earthquake ground motions for construction codes; with five current subtasks:  

• Research on earthquake ground motion maps for construction codes  

• Adoption of USGS earthquake hazard assessments into construction codes  

• Development of web services and data releases for dissemination of earthquake ground motion maps for construction codes  

• Simulation, validation, and utilization of earthquake ground motion time-series for building codes  

• Alternative ground motion intensity measures   

Task 2: Extending natural hazards to risk; with five subtasks:  

• Seismic risk to critical infrastructure  

• Earthquake-induced ground failure forecasts  

• Earthquake ground-motion and impact scenarios  

• Multi-hazard risk assessment  

• Seismic safety of tall buildings and other long-period structures  

These tasks and subtasks have been designed to collaborate with the internal community (e.g., the USGS NSHM Project, the USGS National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC)) to develop requisite data, methods, and tools for assessing risks to building and non-building infrastructure systems. The goals are achieved by collaborating with the external community (e.g., Building Seismic Safety Council (BSSC), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)) to assess design loads and mitigate seismic risk.  

For More Information

• Design Ground Motions
• Earthquake Scenarios
• Engineering Risk Assessment Project Wiki - available soon