Keynote Lecture – From Hazards to Disasters: A Need for a Culture of Resilience
Most hazards become disasters due to the vulnerability of communities, Hurricane Katrina is a good example. In recognition of the increasing impact of disasters and their complexities there is a critical need to enhance resilience of communities to disasters which involves both technical and societal issues. Community resilience can be viewed at three dimensions that are interrelated: having a low probability of failure, minimizing the severity of negative consequences of disasters and recovering expeditiously from the impact of disasters. A framework of resilience for a built environment involves assessing the impact of multiple natural and manmade hazards, degradation and potentially climate change in terms of established performance goals, mitigation, response and recovery. The lecture would include examples of hazards leading to disasters, modeling portfolios couched in cyberinfrastructure, mitigation, response and recovery and a sample of suggested changes in classical engineering approach to design thinking tied to performance based design.