MCEER Reconnaissance Team Investigates Effects South Asia Tsunami / Earthquake Tragedy

Buffalo, NY, March/April 2005 - Ranked as one the most catastrophic events in recent times, the Indonesian earthquake and subsequent tsunami has caused significant damage in eleven countries and resulted in over 150,000 casualties. Countless others are without housing and basic services.

Although MCEER is not conducting research on the physical modeling of tsunami generation and propagation, our strategic plan focuses on enhancing the seismic resilience of communities through multiple-hazard mitigation. Our research on structures/ lifelines, remote sensing, and disaster response and recovery is directly relevant to tsunamis, and this disaster provides a real-world laboratory to assess many dimensions of resilience simultaneously in a range of different societal settings.

In this perspective, MCEER has sent Shubharoop Ghosh, of ImageCat, Inc. to join a team led by Professor Fumio Yamazaki, Chiba University, Japan, and Dr. Pennung Warnitchai, Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, in partnership with the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the Earthquake Disaster Mitigation Research Center (EDM) from Japan, to Thailand from January 6-11, 2005. This MCEER reconnaissance work in Thailand complements EERI's activities in Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. The focus of MCEER at this time is on the remote sensing perspective and social science aspects, and identification of damage using the VIEWS (Visualizing the Impacts of Earthquakes with Satellites) system. VIEWS is a notebook-based system that integrates GPS-registered digital video footage, digital photographs, and observations with high-resolution satellite images of a disaster. It has been successfully deployed in other recent MCEER reconnaissance efforts, such as the 2003 Bam earthquake, 2004 South Florida hurricanes, and the 2004 Niigata, Japan earthquake. (Please visit the MCEER Web site at http://mceer.buffalo.edu to view a full color rendition of areas of potential devastation via the VIEWS system provided by ImageCat, Inc.)

We are eagerly awaiting findings from the reconnaissance team to identify precisely other data collection and research opportunities related to the resilience of infrastructure and communities against multiple hazards of this type. The preliminary information collected by the reconnaissance team will be disseminated to MCEER investigators, industry partners, and students through a keynote address by Mr. Ron Eguchi, President and CEO of ImageCat, Inc., at the upcoming MCEER Annual Meeting in Sacramento, CA, on February 25-26, 2005. MCEER will also provide regular research updates, presentation summaries, and other information related to the earthquake/tsunami event on its Web site at http://mceer.buffalo.edu.

-Michel Bruneau, Director of MCEER