Before Disaster Strikes: How engineers prepare for the unknown.

• Author: Joyal, Brad
• Position: ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING

Earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, and landslides: Alaskans endure a volatile landscape of natural disasters. Whenever these catastrophic events occur, engineers have already prepared for the worst. Whether it's a dam, a road, an office building, or a hospital, all of the state's infrastructure is designed to anticipate 10-year, 50-year, or even 100-year disasters in addition to human-caused damage that may occur during its lifetime.

Planning for the Long Term

Beyond the minimum standards for any type of project, engineers implement more vigilant requirements and practices depending on a structure's location and function.

The first thing that engineers typically start looking at is to find the design criteria the engineer will base the entire project on," says Mark Sams, senior engineer at PND Engineers. "That's a process the engineer needs to work out with the owner of the project at the beginning to kind of decide, 'What is the design life of the project? What is the design life of the infrastructure? Is this project a 10-year design life? Are we looking at some sort of mining infrastructure with a design life of 10 years that the project is only there for 10 years and then the mine is going to close up and shut down, or is this a big, long-term infrastructure project that has a 100-year design life?' That's a big concern at the beginning of a project that really dictates the environmental loading on a facility."

Once the owner and engineer identify the purpose and longevity of the structure, the next step is recognizing hazards that could complicate construction or present long-term challenges. The most common tool engineers turn to during this process is ASCE 7, the American Society of Civil Engineers' publication that is released every six years and includes ASCE's most widely used professional standards.

"Every time the ASCE is updated, it gets a lot thicker, and that's because every so often there's a major earthquake--as was the case when we had our [2018] Anchorage earthquake--that will affect earthquake design and seismic designs nationally," says Sams. "Every time there is a national disaster, there are commissions set up to study what happened, what lessons were learned from damage that occurred, both for big infrastructure and small infrastructure."

Codes Present the Framework

While ASCE-7 is the standard for proper techniques, engineers operate in a framework defined by codes, specifically the International...