SCIENCE AND RESILIENCY: THE SCIENTIST, THE AGENCY, AND THE REALITY

Scientific understanding is key to advancing community resiliency to natural hazards. Unfortunately, both the scientist and their agencies generally poorly understand how science influences public policy. A common viewpoint shared by many investigators is that individual research results, presented at scientific meetings or published in peer-reviewed journals influence, if not drive, the development of community resilience policies. Often scientific papers make pronouncements similar to “these results must be immediately incorporated into new hazard assessments”. Likewise, agencies focus on displaying logos and “box up” results to show performance goals met, but seldom track, or understand how to track, improved resilience. The experience in earthquake research in the Pacific Northwest strongly indicates that improved resilience requires much more. Nearly all advances in new seismic building codes, non-seismic retrofit in the public and private sectors, and other earthquake hazard mitigation activities rely on a strong, and equal partnership among scientists, engineers, emergency managers, the private sector, and the public. The discovery of active crustal faults in the Puget Sound basin provides a good example. Beginning in 2000, USGS fault trenching studies rapidly documented Holocene activity on the Seattle fault, Southern Whidbey Island fault, Tacoma fault, and many others. As the USGS turned the field results into hazard assessments, skepticism among engineers was high and many emergency managers had a difficult time comprehending the consequences. Instead of relying solely on scientific recognition, the USGS embarked on an aggressive effort to explain the new results by sponsoring and participating in many workshops and local discussions, attending a wide variety of non-scientific functions, and working in Project Impact. The USGS became one part of a much larger team dedicated to understanding earthquake hazards and ways to build community resilience. This partnership moves individual results into broad community consensus. In Seattle, this partnership is currently helping to drive efforts to develop an ordinance requiring seismic retrofits of certain classes of unreinforced masonry buildings.