| Communities are disaster-resilient when they have a credible plan that assures the ability to govern and protect community wellbeing while providing flexibility for people and companies to do what is needed to recover quickly. Communities are establishing disaster resilience plans that set performance goals related to their social, economic and physical infrastructure based on their prevailing hazards, age, governance and their social and economic makeup. The goals for the physical infrastructure needed to support recovery are being defined for clusters of buildings and systems in terms of safety and maximum permissible downtime. Structural engineers need to advocate for and assist in the development of their community’s Disaster Resilience Plan and then design, evaluate, and retrofit the buildings and systems they work on to meet those goals. The expertise structural engineers need to provide to the development of the plan and the application of available guidelines, standards and codes related to its implementation will be presented along with the structural engineer’s role during the post event recovery period. |