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NIST Response to the 2012 National Construction Safety Team Advisory Committee (NCSTAC)

Recommendations

Recommendation Response

1. As in 2011, the Committee 

enthusiastically endorses NIST’s plan to 

develop a database of information on 

structural performance during earthquakes, 

fires, windstorms, and other extreme events. 

 NIST believes that establishing the database that the Committee

endorses is very important to our overall success of the Disaster 

and Failure Studies Program. 

 NIST has decided to hire three new staff members to support data 

requirements within the EL - one of these projects includes the 

Disaster and Failure Studies and Data Events Repository. One of 

the duties of each of these three staff members will be to support 

the Repository. 

2. The Committee urges NIST staff to use 

its communication skills as well as its 

technical prowess to advise less 

sophisticated audiences regarding the 

appropriate use of maximum wind speed 

and other parameters arising from NIST 

investigations such as the Joplin tornado. 

Modeling based on such parameters is 

central to the interpretation of damage from 

such investigations and, if used by someone 

other than NIST investigators, must take 

into account the inevitable approximations 

and uncertainties.

 NIST welcomes and fully supports the Committee's

recommendation regarding our wind speed expertise 

 Based in part on the Committee’s suggestions last year, we revised 

the chapter on tree-fall modeling in our Joplin investigation report 

to make it more understandable to multiple audiences beyond 

those involved in modeling work. 

 The lead investigator on this work, Dr. Frank Lombardo, is 

preparing articles for publications that are aimed at wind experts 

and has had early discussions about potentially developing a 

training tool so that National Weather Service employees who are 

tasked with rating tornado damage will be able to readily use the 

tree-fall model. 

 Our goal is to see the tree-fall approach used widely – and 

appropriately – in practice to complement assessments based on 

the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale. 
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Recommendation Response

3. The Committee urges that data gathering 

should lead to enhanced public welfare, 

especially improved life safety and 

community resilience consistent with that 

described in the recently published National 

Research Council report on resilience. Data 

gathering by National Construction Safety 

Teams should be expanded to include 

infrastructure as well as buildings.

 Expanding NIST’s formal NCST responsibilities to include 

infrastructure is of great interest to NIST.

 Bill (HR 2132) pending in the House would combine many Federal 

responsibilities relating to earthquake hazards, wind, and fires.

4. The Committee recommends that NIST 

advance the social science element of the 

Joplin tornado investigation, and of 

investigations of other events affecting 

broad geographical areas, such as 

Superstorm Sandy, to better understand 

how human behavior contributed to the 

casualties. To the extent that improved selfprotective actions would reduce casualties, 

it is recommended that NIST undertake or 

become a prime contributor to a program of 

science-based public information and 

education.

 NIST increasingly has recognized the importance of incorporating 

social science into its failure investigations and studies, which is 

consistent with the Committee’s recommendations.

 NIST’s investigation in Joplin prominently included and integrated 

human behavioral considerations and findings. This yielded a 

much richer understanding of how building failures and human 

behavior impacted the pattern, location, and cause of casualties. 

 NIST has been working for the past several years on a DHS-funded 

project to improve the information that building managers and 

emergency personnel provide to the public in times of disasters. 

 NIST researchers also are producing two guidance documents for 

the General Services Administration (GSA). 

 In conclusion, NIST is fully in sync with and appreciate your 

recommendations in this area. We will keep you updated as our 

work progresses.
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Recommendation Response

5. The Committee recommends that more 

events should be investigated. The decisionmaking criteria, leading to scoring on a fivepoint scale, appear to be appropriate. Due to 

resource limitations, NIST can only 

investigate a limited number of events. 

However, valuable data are being lost due to 

these limitations. In this regard, the 

Committee strongly endorses NIST’s 

decision to participate in the FEMA 

investigation of Super Storm Sandy.

 We have recently revised our decision criteria to consider six very 

fundamental companion questions to the formal quantitative 

criteria. NIST will share the revised criteria with the Committee 

tomorrow morning. 

 The revision to the criteria effectively de-emphasizes the formal 

scoring, which we think is a good thing. 

 These decisions about what events call for NIST to investigate will 

never be easy and will require a lot of thought. We believe that we 

now have more appropriate criteria for making decisions.

6. The Committee recommends that NIST 

collect data on fires following all disasters 

driven by natural events. The National Fire 

Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is 

intended to capture fire data but in fact 

leaves gaps in the data. NIST staff, trained in 

mass-disaster data collection and armed 

with simple collection and recording 

systems that can capture geospatial data, 

could greatly enhance the usefulness of 

NFIRS.

 NIST agrees with the spirit of your recommendation, and with 

your observation that systematically collecting data from fires 

caused by natural events would be very beneficial.

 NFIRS is managed by the U.S. Fire Administration, and they said 

that they already are overloaded with priority requests to 

improve NFIRS and they lack the ability to respond to the requests 

now considering their limited resources.

 NIST has been working on a specialized Wildland Urban Interface 

(WUI) data collection system for several years as a proof of 

concept which could be expanded to non WUI-fire disasters. Our 

goal would be to (1) pilot this technology in a limited way on a 

select number of investigations to test its effectiveness and (2) 

link the data to the Disaster and Failure Events Repository.