Damage Assessments: SARAID Case Studies including Albania & Beirut

Synopsis

Following a disaster, it is necessary to quickly understand the damage that has occurred to enable decision-making for emergency response, life-safety, and recovery in the short to long term. Primarily, effective damage assessments require sound procedures for technical inspection. But for inspections to inform decision-making, they require a complete system considering: coordination of assessors, the legal/procedural framework they operate in, and the collection and analysis of data. This talk will present experiences in post-disaster damage assessment from the Nepal Earthquake (2015), Hurricane Irma (2017), Albania Earthquakes (2019), and Beirut Explosion (2020).

About the speakers

Josh Macabuag is Acting Chair of the IStructE’s Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT). He has a background in building design with a number of UK consultancies, a PhD in building damage predictions for tsunami, and now consults in catastrophe risk modelling to the World Bank and the (re)insurance sector. He is also an Urban Search & Rescue (USAR) Engineer with the UK team SARAID, with several deployments through both SARAID and the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism.

Mark Scorer is a committee member of the Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics (SECED). He has a background in earthquake engineering, engineering seismology and geotechnics and works as a Chief Engineer for Atkins SNC-L. Mark is member of the UK Charity Search & Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID) specialising as an Urban Search & Rescue (USAR) Engineer and also performing the roles of International Development Officer and Engineering Training Officer. He has several deployments with SARAID, the UK government and is trained within the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism.

Suzie Cooper is a structural engineer at Elliott Wood. She has a background in building design working on projects in a variety of sectors across London. Suzie is also an Urban Search & Rescue (USAR) Engineer for the UK Charity Search & Rescue Assistance in Disasters (SARAID). She has been deployed to Albania and more recently Beirut, where she was part of the team who set up the Damage Assessment Coordination Centre and also provided advice to the Lebanese authorities on their assessment procedures. She is soon to start her training with the European Union Civil Protection Mechanism.

Further information

This evening meeting is jointly organised by SECED (Young Members Sub-Committee), EEFIT and IstructE (London Young Members Group). The meeting will be chaired by Valentina Putrino (UCL) & Nikos Lipitkas (Robert Bird Group). The event will take place online. To participate, you have to register first using the following link.

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