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The purpose of the talk is to put in context and describe a study that analyzed three jurisdictional earthquake resilience planning and policy initiatives in California, Washington, and Oregon. The study was commissioned by Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup (CREW) to help provide direction on types of programs and projects CREW can facilitate or develop in collaboration with organizations in its member states of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. An objective of the study was to reveal divergent and convergent themes across the initiatives and their respective documents, as well as to help identity possible overlooked or underemphasized themes. The study provides evidence-based information for use in evaluating the analyzed initiatives, as well as related current and future initiatives. Resilient City, conducted by SPUR (San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association) in collaboration with Degenkolb Engineers was the first of the three initiatives and is the point of comparison for this study. SPUR Resilient City sparked two state-level earthquake resilience initiatives conducted by the State of Washington Seismic Safety Committee and the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission. The Resilient Washington State (RWS) final report and the Oregon Resilience Plan (ORP) were published in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Similar to SPUR's initiative, Degenkolb Engineers collaborated on both the RWS and ORP initiatives.
Between the three seismic resilience initiatives approximately 500 recommendations were put forward that might increase city- and state-level resilience to earthquakes. Implementation (and planning for implementation) of these recommendations is at different stages for each initiative. Only limited progress should be expected at this point given the multiplicity of recommendations, as well as the several decades-long implementation horizons for each initiative. At the same time it is critical to monitor their progress and impact. A clear outcome of these initiatives to date is an evolution of thinking on how to approach building seismic resilience capacity. The influence of these initiatives is certain to expand outside the original jurisdictions with the development of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's community resilience planning guide, which is patterned after the SPUR approach and the adaptations made for the RWS and ORP initiatives. The initiatives have created a professional network for discussing recovery-focused community resilience planning, as well as collegial inter-jurisdictional competition that should lead to innovation for resilience capacity building. Ultimately, it is hoped that this study engenders an informed discussion about seismic resilience capacity building initiatives, particularly across CREW's member states.
Bio: Dr. Scott Miles is an expert on disaster risk reduction, community resilience, and lifeline infrastructure. He is currently a research scientist in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering at University of Washington and a private consultant. Prior to University of Washington, he was instrumental in establishing Western Washington University's disaster risk reduction undergraduate program, as well as WWU's Resilience Institute. He possesses a unique set of skills and experiences across the fields of civil engineering, geomorphology, geographic information systems, and urban planning. As a social scientist with an engineering background, Dr. Miles has a strong foundation in both quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. Dr. Miles has received grant funding or contracts from the National Science Foundation, Natural Hazards Center, Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, Washington State Emergency Management Division, Washington State Department of Ecology, King County Office of Emergency Management, NOAA, and USGS, among others. Dr. Miles received his Ph.D. in geography from University of Washington, where he studied the synergy between urban geography, geological hazards, disaster recovery, spatial simulation modeling, and collaborative process design. He received a post-graduate diploma from the University of Edinburgh in GIS, with a focus on environmental modeling. His MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering is from University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he focused on geotechnical earthquake engineering and numerical methods. An undergraduate degree in the same field was received from Washington State University. Dr. Miles was a member of the U.S. Geological Survey Western Region Earthquake Hazards Team for six years, as well as a university instructor, research associate, and private consultant.
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United States
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