Civil and Systems Engineering Seminar: Abbie Liel

Description

Abbie Liel, a professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for a talk titled "Barriers and Opportunities in Engineering Disaster-Resilient Housing" for the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering.

Please attend the event by using the Zoom link.

Safe, disaster-resilient housing is critical to our way of life, prosperity and sense of security. Yet, despite decades of advances in technologies for engineering resilient housing, houses remain particularly vulnerable to damage from earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fires and other hazards, and this loss of housing has long-term community impacts, affecting workforce availability, economic prosperity, and public health, and exacerbating housing shortages. This talk will first explore housing safety challenges in multihazard environments, using probabilistic performance assessments to characterize structural safety. Arguing that how residents perceive housing safety affects how structures are designed, built or maintained, it will also describe work done to characterize households' perceptions of hurricane and earthquake safety. By comparing the structural performance assessments with the household perceptions, it will conclude by exploring how household perceptions of safety align – or misalign – with scientific and engineering knowledge, highlighting opportunities for changing how we design, build and maintain housing structures.