The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program released its first strategic plan in 15 years earlier this year. With four strategic goals and supporting objectives covering the fiscal years 2022-29, the plan enhances the nation's ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from earthquakes.

Through its four coordinated goals, NEHRP intends to improve scientific understanding of seismic events and their consequences, to improve methods for protecting against those consequences, to improve strategies for dealing with earthquakes, and to improve community resilience by learning from seismic events.

Understanding Functional Recovery

The new strategic plan emphasizes the functional recovery of buildings and lifeline infrastructure. As seismic design has long been the goal of such facilities, this reflects the growing desire to design them so they will not only ensure life safety during an earthquake, but will also be able to be quickly repaired and put back into service. “That’s a big push right now,” says John “Jay” Harris III, Ph.D., S.E., P.E., F.SEI, M.ASCE, the acting NEHRP director and a research structural engineer for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"Although life safety remains paramount and underscores all seismic risk-reduction efforts, addressing functional recovery in design and retrofit represents an enhanced approach in which an asset of the built environment can be designed to directly support the resiliency of a community," Harris says.

The switch toward functional recovery represents a significant shift in approach, according to Steven McCabe, Ph.D., PE, M.ASCE, a former Director of NEHRP who currently heads NIST's Engineering Laboratory's Materials and Structural Systems Division as the associate division chief for statutory programs. The ability to recover function relatively quickly is a critical requirement, McCabe says.

Buildings are usually not designed to support post-earthquake functionality unless they are required by an authority, Harris explains. It is still possible, however, to design a building to take into account this post-earthquake condition, he notes. As Harris futher explains, functional recovery with these available or new methods helps address how the performance of an asset impacts a community's resiliency after an earthquake.

McCabe adds “The human side of (earthquake recovery) is extremely important and something that really needs to be addressed... You can keep a building standing, but if the services that are housed in those buildings are unable to operate, you've got a problem.”

According to Harris, a community whose power distribution system needs to be repaired following an earthquake, but is inaccessible because a bridge has been severely damaged. “How do you respond or recover from an earthquake if your lifelines aren’t working?” he asks. Basically, he says, we want to come up with a consistent guideline for the different forms of lifeline infrastructure.

Focused efforts

Representatives from the four federal agencies that make up NEHRP developed the new strategic plan for NEHRP.

The strategic plan, says Harris, is used as the basis for NEHRP's programs, even though the congressional mandate defines NEHRP's mission broadly.

As a result, the plan answers the question, “What is it that we should really focus our efforts on?” Harris says.

The NEHRP has “chosen four goals to define our strategic direction for the program to support our mission,” as part of the new strategic plan Harris states. As a whole, the four goals address the "life cycle" of earthquake preparedness, covering steps to be taken before, during, and after an earthquake. According to Harris, the goals also aim to incorporate a "feedback loop" to encourage NEHRP to continuously review and revise its practices in light of earthquake experience.

Main Goals

1. Advance the understanding of earthquake processes and their consequences.
2. Enhance existing and develop new information, tools, and practices for protecting the nation from earthquake consequences.
3. Promote the dissemination of knowledge and implementation of tools, practices, and policies that enhance strategies to withstand, respond to, and recover from earthquakes.
4. Learn from post-earthquake investigations to enhance the effectiveness of available information, tools, practices, and policies to improve earthquake resilience.

Areas of Focus

Additionally, the strategic plan identifies a number of focus areas, including:

• Advance earthquake science for subduction zone regions.
• Develop enhanced performance-based seismic design procedures and metrics for the functional recovery of new and existing buildings and lifeline infrastructure.
• Advance performance-based seismic design and assessment methods to implement multisystem coordination.
• Further expand earthquake early warning capabilities.
• Develop consistent performance guidance for lifeline infrastructure.
• Enhance guidance to ensure that information and tools effectively support the needs of those who implement mitigation, preparedness, and recovery measures.
• Advance the science of earthquake sequence characterization.
• Enhance risk-reduction strategies for federal agencies.

According to the plan, these focus areas address problems of serious public importance while providing opportunities for innovation and advancement in seismic risk reduction.

The Pacific Northwest in the United States is most at risk of earthquakes associated with subduction zones, where one tectonic plate is being forced beneath another. “We have less information about subduction zone earthquakes because they don’t happen that often,” Harris says. He notes, however, that such earthquakes can be devastating when they occur. Consequently, Harris says, subduction zone earthquakes and their consequences must be studied much more scientifically.

A key concern for the need for consistent performance guidance for lifeline infrastructure is the ability of communities to recover from earthquakes if certain key infrastructure components are not designed to withstand different seismic hazards.

‍