Guest blogger: Marc Percher, P.E.
COPRI Chile team member

So what gets an engineer excited to get out of bed at 4 a.m. and onto a plane for 20 hours? The opportunity to learn from a rare event and hopefully help the field develop new ways to protect the public, of course. ASCE and the Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute have organized our team to travel to Chile and study post-earthquake conditions. We intend to focus on the impact of the 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami which caused damage throughout Chile on Feb. 27. Our hope is that by documenting the experiences in Chile, we can gather hard-won lessons from such a massive quake.

[The COPRI team is one of three sponsored by ASCE that are investigating earthquake damage in Chile. Teams from the Structural Engineering Institute and the Technical Council on Lifeline Earthquake Engineering are also probing damage to Chilean infrastructure in their specialties. ]

Over the last week or two, when I tell people I’ll be traveling to Chile, I often have been asked why. While it may appear like morbid tourism, for me it comes down to two reasons: 1) to gain experience through studying the failure (or lack thereof) of infrastructure and 2) to remind myself, those in my field, and the general public of the responsibility of the civil engineer.

One of the lessons I learned in college (thank you, ASCE steel bridge competition) was that different engineering fields approach design and testing based on their ability to “fail” their subject. A mechanical engineer can make a widget, take it to the lab or the field and load it to the point of breaking, note where that was and alter their design improve the performance, repeating the process until they’re satisfied with their product. Computer scientists have an even quicker evolution, writing code, testing, failing, and rewriting in a continuous manner (which probably explains why my computer software seems to get replaced every six months).

Civil engineers are at the other end of the spectrum. We have to build things the correct way the first time and often our designs don’t see their peak forces over their entire design lifetimes (we hope). For us, there is little to no chance to physically test a design (though labs can test pieces of a structure), so whenever a major structural failure occurs, there is a need to thoroughly study that failure and figure out what lessons can be learned for future designs. The Chile earthquake is an excellent opportunity to see what went right and wrong under extreme conditions that are impossible to physically replicate.

Of course, learning lessons is only useful if you teach those lessons to others and help them enforce those lessons in the practices of the field. As an outcome of our survey, academic and practicing engineers will study the findings and figure out what to look at in-depth. Detailed investigations will be performed, and eventually new practices will be developed. These practices work their way into design codes and help ensure that our field uses the best possible methods to protect the public. Design codes represent the accumulated knowledge gained from thousands of separate events and experiences. It is easy to consider them (and the regulators, building officials, and peer reviewers who enforce them) as annoyances, but events such as Chile and Haiti serve to remind the community and the public the importance of these documents. Sadly, Haiti was a horrific example of what goes wrong when there is a lack of resources (both financially and within the knowledge base), with a death toll several magnitudes higher than Chile for a earthquake that was far smaller. Chile is a country with advanced design codes, good enforcement, and many modern structures. In many ways the experiences in Chile will be similar to what we can expect of a major quake on the U.S. West Coast. By seeing the effects of proper design and construction, we are reminded of the importance of respecting our responsibilities in our daily work, because we never know when it will be us who becomes the example of what to, or not to do.

Now, here’s a bit about the rest of the COPRI team:

· Billy L. Edge, P.E., Ph.D., Dist.M.ASCE, Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University. Billy is leading our team and is a coastal engineering specialist. He’ll be traveling up and down the coast studying the impact of tsunamis.

· Russell Boudreau, P.E., F.ASCE, Moffat and Nichol, Long Beach, Calif. Russel is also a coastal specialist and will be traveling with Billy, focusing on tsunamis.

· Kandiah (Arul) Arulmoli, Ph.D., P.E., G.E., D.GE., F.ASCE, Earth Mechanics, Inc., Fountain Valley, Calif. Arul is the geotechnical engineer on the team and specializes in marine conditions. He’ll be invaluable for keeping us structural folks from blaming the soils for everything.

· Martin Eskijian, P.E., F.ASCE, California State Lands Commission Marine Facilities Division, Long Beach, Calif. Martin is the chief engineer at CSLC and is the elder statesman marine structures expert of our group (I can only get away with saying “elder statesman” as he constantly reminds us he’ll be retiring in a year or two … for the past few years). Martin has been instrumental in developing the governing code for design and assessment of marine oil terminals in California and brings decades of experience with him.

· Omar A. Jaradat, Ph.D., P.E., Moffatt & Nichol, Long Beach, Calif. Omar is a project manager and structural analyst, with experience working on marginal wharf structures typical of container wharfs. We’ll be looking at several such facilities on our tour.

· Miguel Carbuccia, P.E., PBS&J, Orange, Calif. Miguel is a structural engineering expert and brings the added benefit of being a native Chilean. Hopefully he won’t be too bugged by the rest of the team asking for translation.

· Marc Percher, P.E., Halcrow, Oakland, Calif. That would be me. I’m a structural analyst and designer specializing in marine oil terminals and refinery structures. I’ll be trying my best to keep up with the team and keep you informed through these posts.

We are all very excited to take advantage of this opportunity to learn and help our community of engineers. I’ll follow with more information as it develops, and eventually we’ll produce a formal report in which you can learn about our experiences in more detail. Thanks for reading and I hope that we can educate as well as provide a sampling of our experiences in Chile.