2013 Issue

33 Members of an emergency response task force trained through workshops organized by ASCE’s Committee on Critical Infrastructure carried out inspections in July of structures damaged by wildfires in Utah. Their efforts proved to be a valuable supplement to those of firefighters, police of- ficers, building officials, and emergency management personnel. Image credit: Robert Snow ner, a former president of the Wasatch Front Branch, part of ASCE’s Utah Section. “However, an important goal of our first real deployment also was to see how we would work as a team. We performed our fire checks, looked at the structure to see what kind of damage had been done, and made an assessment on its safety. But for our first time out together at a live event, I think we worked very well as a team.” Snow says that the team members felt that the re- connaissance provided a number of important insights that will help them improve organiza- tion, reporting proce- dures, and building as- sessments. “We viewed our response to this disaster,” he says, “as preparatory to organiz- ing a response to other catastrophic events.” In April, as a prelude to its work in assessing building safety in connection with the Utah wildfires, the team was invited by the agency Salt Lake County Emergency Management to take part in a FEMA emergency training exercise, or “shakeout,” dealing with the aftermath of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. “Mike Barrett [an emergency management consultant with Gorilla Design who acts as a consultant to Salt Lake County] had proposed that the [emergency response team] work jointly with local fire [and] building officials and the emergency managers at UDOT [Utah De- partment of Transportation], as well as with the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, the American Public Works Association, and the Utah National Guard,” says Francis. “With those organizations we developed a joint assessment team program where the ASCE pilot team would be responsible for doing the building damage assessment. “The teams performed damage assessments on the three critical facilities during the simulated earthquake: the Salt Palace Conven- tion Center, which will be used for sheltering; the Salt Lake City and County Building, which will be used for administration, the mayor, and the official representatives of the county; and then the Emergency Operations Center, where the command and commu- nication take place. After the exercise, one of the take-aways was that CCI felt the need to develop fifty damage assessment teams from throughout the U.S., each one composed of an engineer, a member of the police and fire department, and a building official representative.” Francis says that the CCI will be issuing a report for the Board of Direction covering both the results of the earthquake shakeout in April and the response task force’s efforts at the wildfires in Utah last month. The committee will also be producing a guide for emer- gency response task forces that could be disseminated through ASCE’s sections and branches. “We feel more prepared to respond to future emergencies,” con- cludes Snow. For more information about the CCI, including its postdisaster assessment workshops and disaster management training resources, go to http://ciasce.asce.org/cci-programs.