Tag: Resilience

  • Resilience Ratings are here

    A major recommendation of the Oregon Resilience Plan was the establishment of resilience ratings for building and communities.  The idea was to let people and communities know how well a particular building, structure or community would perform in the Cascadia Earthquake.  The goal was to  help people make informed decisions about the acceptable level of risk.  These…

  • Making resilience a Priority in School District

    The Oregon Chapter the Association of Civil Engineers was just mentioned in an article on making resilience a priority for school districts.  The article from ASCE News, focuses on the efforts of the Beaverton School District to adopt the findings of the Oregon Resilience Plan (ORP) for schools. The ORP’s  goals were to ensure that schools…

  • OPB “Unprepared” Documentary

    OPB has been doing an incredible integrated radio, TV, and online effort, called “Unprepared”, looking at the vulnerability of the region to a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and resulting tsunami. The finale will be an airing of the Oregon Field Guide Special Unprepared Documentary.  The premier showing will be October 1, 2015 at 6:10 pm.  For those wanting…

  • Big Story and small stories that add up

    The big story was the recent New Yorker article, “The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle” that caused quite a stir both here in the Northwest and the rest of the country by providing a very well written summary of what the Cascadia earthquake and resulting tsunami will do to the region.  The smaller stories are…

  • The Future of Cars and Cities 2

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    A couple of years ago I wrote a blog about the Future of Cars and Cities where I talked about the potential impact of driverless cars.  Development is speeding up, especially with the rise of Uber.  A recent article by Zack Kanter called How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 million jobs and Reshape the Economy…

  • OPB’s What’s my Risk?

    On the anniversary of the last Cascadia earthquake and tsunami 315 years ago, OPB has done an excellent series of stories called “Unprepared: Will We Be Ready for the Megaquake?”   As the articles points out, a large Cascadia earthquake and tsunami can occur anytime, and it reviews how prepared we are and compares it…

  • Oregon Design Professionals Day at the Capitol

    On Tuesday, February 17th, Oregon’s design professional community will be coming together to meet with the Oregon Legislature.  Typically these types of events are a chance for design professionals to talk to legislators about  professional concerns.  This year is a bit different.  The design community is focussing on the passage of the Oregon Resilience Task Force…

  • The Oregon Resilience Plan: A call to expand the sustainability conversation

    Edward Wolf has laid down a challenge to the sustainability community to include resilience as part of sustainability in an article in Sustainable Business Oregon.  Ted,  a writer on environmental issues, was drawn into seismic and resiliency when he discovered how seismically suspect the schools his child was attending in Portland were.  He has become…

  • Washington Resilience Plan

      The State of Washington has released its final report for the Washington Resilience Plan.  This plan also drew its inspiration from SPUR’s Resilient City report for San Francisco.  Since they started their effort before Oregon did, we also drew on the work Washington was doing.  These two state reports are complementary and provide a…

  • AIA and Resilience

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    I have been trying to get the architectural community more involved in the preparing for the Cascadia earthquake/tsunami and resiliency.  The American Institute of Architects (AIA) was at one time very involved in emergency preparedness and in the 1970’s help come up with the response-relief-mitigation cycle.  In recent years, the AIA had lost interest in…