Deciding What’s Safe: Making Choices about Earthquake Safety

In 1997, to provide support for integrated research aimed at reducing earthquake losses in the United States, the National Science Foundation ~NSF! awarded competitive grants to the following three multiuniversity earthquake research consortia: the MidAmerica Earthquake Center ~MAE! headquartered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research ~MCEER! based at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center ~PEER! whose lead institution is the University of California at Berkeley. The three centers differ in the types of earthquake-induced problems, engineered systems, and geographic regions on which they focus, but they also have a number of things in common. Following NSF guidelines for engineering research centers, all of the centers combine state-of-the art research with graduate and undergraduate education and with outreach to the broader earthquake lossreduction community. Each center has developed close ties with industry and with end-users of new research products and technologies. Perhaps most important, all three centers carry out research programs that integrate earth science, engineering, and the social sciences. This broad multidisciplinary perspective enables center researchers to look at the earthquake threat in new ways that go well beyond previous research. For the first time on such a large scale, earthquake engineering is being considered in a larger community and societal context. Researchers are looking beyond individual engineering solutions to grapple with questions related to policy development, adoption, and implementation; decision making and trade-offs; alternative perspectives on acceptable risk; and the societal costs and benefits associated with alternative lossreduction measures @for discussions, see Bruneau and Tierney ~2002!#. For example, the PEER center, which has as its main emphasis performance-based engineering, also sponsors research on societal aspects of seismic code enforcement and seeks to develop tools to help facility owners and the general public make decisions concerning what levels of performance they consider acceptable for structures and infrastructure systems. MCEER, whose research program focuses on lifeline systems, health-care facilities, and disaster response and recovery, explores technologies and decision support tools that will enhance community and societal resilience, which is defined in technical, organizational, social, and economic terms. Through its program on consequence-based engineering and the visualization of earthquake impacts in the mid-American region, the MAE center seeks to work with stakeholder groups, such as insurers and owners of large portfolios of structures, to explore various mitigation options appropriate to that region. Many research activities at the three centers utilize methods that integrate research across disciplines, such as geographic information systems ~GIS! for earthquake loss estimation as well as methodologies designed to improve mitigation, response, and recovery decision making. To address the earthquake threat in an integrated and holistic manner, the centers carry out their work in teams that span a broad range of disciplines—far broader than had been the case in previous research on earthquake hazards. Center projects involve collaboration among seismologists and ground-motion experts; engineering researchers specializing in lifeline systems and system components ~water, gas, and electric power systems, highway systems, bridges!, different types of structures, nonstructural earthquake hazards, and advanced technologies; and social scientists representing the fields of geography and regional science, economics, urban planning, sociology, decision science, political science, and public policy. The earthquake centers have been especially strong in fostering collaborative ties between engineers and social scientists. Researchers representing different disciplines work together and coauthor publications on such topics as estimating the economic losses that could result from earthquakeinduced lifeline service disruption in the Central United States ~Shinozuka et al. 1998! and ways of measuring and quantifying seismic resilience ~Bruneau et al. 2003!. These types of sustained interactions and collaborations would not have been possible without the overarching vision and support that the centers provide. The centers have also taken steps to foster an academic culture that enables students to understand hazards in their broader context by moving beyond their own disciplinary boundaries. New courses, course modules, and Web-based guest lectures by centeraffiliated faculty have been developed specifically to introduce students to research and insights from disciplines other than their own. Center-supported students from different academic fields have formed student leadership councils that sponsor a variety of activities, including special student conferences, research volumes, and paper competitions. With NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates ~REU! funding, undergraduate students have also had the opportunity to take part in interuniversity summer exchange programs, special conferences, and other educational activities. Although the three centers pursue individual research plans that are consistent with their overall missions, there are clearly areas in which those missions overlap, providing opportunities for cross-center collaboration. One such area is the study of lifeline systems including both utility and transportation lifelines; earthquake loss estimation at both community and regional levels is another. A third area in which considerable cross-center collaboration has occurred is in the social sciences. In one such collaborative effort, funded separately by FEMA, center-affiliated social scientists worked together to develop a series of research-based white papers and condensed practical guidelines designed specifically for use by local, state, and regional seismic safety advocates. The topics covered in the white papers and guidance include earthquake policy formulation and implementation, risk commu-