2013 Issue

32 The members of an emergency response task force trained and organized by ASCE’s Committee on Critical Infrastructure (CCI) had their first call to action when they were summoned to work with firefighters, police officers, building officials, and emergency management personnel in Utah in inspecting structures damaged by the wildfires that have ravaged that state this summer. T he members of the task force included Brian Warner, P.E., S.E., M.ASCE, a structural engineer with McNeil Engineering, of Sandy, Utah; Robert Snow, P.E., A.M.ASCE, a geohazards engineer with URS, which is headquartered in San Francisco; and Ryan Maw, P.E., M.ASCE, also a geohazards engineer with URS. The team carried out reconnaissance work on structures damaged or destroyed by the fire that hit Herriman, Utah, on July 3. They inspected six properties affected in various ways by the fire, functioning as a valuable component of a larger, profession- ally trained emergencymanagement team. “The wildfire started in a rural and wooded residential area just south of Salt Lake City,” says Snow, a resident of Utah. “Rapid response by local officials and emergency responders helped limit the total number of residences that was destroyed.” “This was the first real event where ASCE- trained volunteer members went on an ex- ercise jointly with fire [and] building officials and officers of emergency management,” says Mathew Francis, P.E., M.ASCE, the CCI’s chair and a senior program manager for infrastructure resilience in the Gaith- ersburg, Maryland, office of URS. “To set up this pilot program in Utah, we not only had to train volunteer engineers, but we had to create an operational framework and agreements with the [Salt Lake] county emergency officers, including emergency management, building, and the fire depart- ment officials.” The emergency response task force in Utah was the first team trained by the CCI to be deployed in the field. Teams organized in Seattle and Boston have begun training, and teams in Nashville, Tennessee, in Chi- cago, and inCalifornia and northern Virginia are being planned. To help set up emergency response teams and train Society members on the proce- dures that are to be followed in evaluat- ing buildings for safety, the CCI offers workshops around the country through the Society’s sections and branches. These workshops draw on the California Emer- gency Management Agency’s program for assessing building safety, which in turn uses materials developed by the Applied Technology Council (ATC), in particular, the manuals ATC-20 (Procedures for Postearth- quake Safety Evaluation of Buildings) and ATC-45 (Safety Evaluation of Buildings after Windstorms and Floods). “To do building damage assessments— commonly done in the recovery phase— we need to have fully trained teams of engineers in the field as soon as possible following an event so homeowners and businesses can get back on their feet quicker,” notes Francis. “In a large disaster, where there are literally tens of thousands of buildings that need to be assessed before they can be reoccupied, there is a critical need for large-scale resources [in the form] of fully trained engineers. “The CCI pilot emergency response task force program was established in October 2010 with FEMA [Federal Emergency Man- agement Agency] credentialing so that ASCE local sections could organize their teams for those kinds of disasters with the idea that they can be trained locally and in accordance with local state regulations. But they alsowould have the credentialing to be deployed as a state resource under FEMA in a national disaster declaration called under EMAC [Emergency Management Assistance Compact].” “During the wildfire, the intent of the team was tohelp the county, city, and stateofficials inspect buildings in order to helppeopleget back in their homes sooner,” recalls War- Group Trained by CCI Proves Its Worth in First Deployment By Doug Scott