Building assessment during disaster response and recovery

Peña-Mora, F; Aziz, ZUH; Chen, A; Plans, A; Foltz, S

Abstract

During disaster response and recovery operations,
civil engineers can be assigned a multitude of tasks
including triage of building search priorities, identifi cation
and evaluation of structural hazards, as well as the
development of appropriate structural hazard mitigation
techniques and monitoring of hazards, while coordinating
and reporting this information to the incident command
centre (ICC). This paper reviews the role of civil
engineers in disaster response with a focus on existing
building assessment and marking systems and highlights
various limitations of existing approaches. A mobile
information technology (IT)-based collaborative
framework is discussed to facilitate a coordinated
disaster response and recovery operation. It enables
engineers to assess building damage better and to make
this information available to personnel more quickly and
easily within the disaster area and thereby improve
disaster response. The deployed architecture is composed
of various components including radio frequency
identifi cation (RFID)-based structural assessment, a field
engineer’s mobility and information support platform
and geographic information systems (GIS)-based
resource optimisation. Deployed infrastructure enables
the on-site and on-demand information provisioning,
data processing and computational support required by
engineers in the aftermath of a disaster.

Citation

Peña-Mora, F., Aziz, Z., Chen, A., Plans, A., & Foltz, S. (2008). Building assessment during disaster response and recovery. Proceedings of the ICE - Urban Design and Planning, 161(4), 183-195. https://doi.org/10.1680/udap.2008.161.4.183

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Mar 27, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 27, 2013
• Journal: Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers
• Print ISSN: 1755-0793
• Publisher: Thomas Telford
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 161
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 183-195
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1680/udap.2008.161.4.183
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1680/udap.2008.161.4.183
• Related Public URLs: http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/serial/udap;jsessionid=4df1efb19o1n5.x-telford-live-01
• Additional Information: Funders : National Science Foundation (NSF)