At the 2010 annual meeting in San Francisco EERI staff filmed brief interviews with a handful of those attending, asking what benefit they derive from their EERI membership and their involvement in EERI activities.

The interviews were edited into a short video that is now available on our Membership web page: http://www.eeri.org/site/membership

Please share with colleagues who might be interested in joining EERI!

The journal Earthquake Spectra will be publishing a special issue on the January 2010 Haiti Earthquake. Papers are invited on the earth science, engineering, and social and economic sciences aspects of the earthquake and its aftermath. All papers should be submitted online through the Earthquake Spectra manuscript submission web page: http://eqs.peerx-press.org. When the manuscript is uploaded, authors must select “Haiti Earthquake” from the drop-down list for special issues.

EERI's Learning from Earthquakes reconnaissance team, under the leadership of Jack Moehle, is now on the ground in Chile.  There, team members will document the effects of the massive 8.8 earthquake that struck that country on February 27th, and ultimately bring back lessons for practice and academia in both the U.S. and Chile. Follow the team's field observations and photographs on EERI's Chile Clearinghouse site. A list of team members as of 3/09/10 is available here.

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A multi-disciplinary team of US earthquake researchers and practitioners, organized by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), is traveling to Haiti to document scientific, engineering and societal effects resulting from the devastating January 12 earthquake in Haiti. The research team is under the leadership of Reginald DesRoches, Professor and Associate Chair of the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, a native of Haiti and a current EERI Board member, and includes experts in engineering, urban planning, architecture, geography, and community resilience.

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The World Bank, supported by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), announced today that it has mobilized scientists and technical experts around the world to help assess the impacts of the earthquake in Haiti. The initiative, called Operation GEO-CAN — which stands for Global Earth Observation-Catastrophe Assessment Network — will estimate and classify building damage based on high resolution aerial imagery in areas severely affected by the earthquake, including Port-au-Prince.

The initiative to create this network came from ImageCat, a leading provider of advanced technologies for risk and disaster management headquartered in Long Beach, California, and its partners – Rochester Institute of Technology, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), and other institutions. The World Bank and GEO-CAN are working in a joint mission to collect, process, and analyze very high resolution optical, thermal infra-red, topographic images allowing detailed visualization of houses, public buildings, cars, vegetation, and even people. Imagery and data from other collectors in this global effort, such as Google and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is also being analyzed.

Results of the analysis, with pre- and post-imagery, are visible at ImageCat's Virtual Disaster Viewer site.

The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is a unique private-public alliance with the mission of producing software and tools that help to reduce earthquake risk worldwide. In order to collect data to guide the design and development of software and its underlying basis, GEM is assessing user needs in a web-based survey requiring less than 10 minutes. The survey can be found at www.globalquakemodel.org and is available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and Japanese. GEM invites all to participate by clicking on the red banner in the upper right corner. Results of the survey will be available at the GEM website upon completion.

With funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), EERI has sent teams to both Samoa and Indonesia.  EERI's reconnaissance team to Padang, Indonesia, headed up by Professor Greg Deierlein of Stanford University, is posting information from the field to a blogsite/virtual clearinghouse.  Visit this site by clicking HERE.

Information from the Samoan investigation, provided by EERI member and structural engineer Steven Baldridge, President of Baldridge and Associates in Honolulu, Hawaii, will be provided soon.