Pehlivan in December 2017 at The Seattle Public Library. Photo: ©Stefanie Felix
A still photo from “Dream Big,” with Pehlivan using everyday items to demonstrate to children how engineers design and build earthquake-proof structures. Photo: courtesy of MacGillivray Freeman Films, “Dream Big”
With a seemingly clear-cut path in front of her, Pehlivan has an excel- lent vantage point from which to see the industry and the science, and what they can do for mankind. So far so good — think Mexico City — but more can, and must, be done, Pehlivan said. As it stands, earthquake engineering is good at securing a structure so that people can survive a quake, but the building itself may no longer be viable. “I’m not telling you the building will be usable, but that you can get out safely,” Pehlivan explained. She wants to take it to the next level, beyond critical buildings like hospitals, to residential and commercial. “Build it in a way that the damage can be repaired,” she said, invoking keywords prevalent in engineering circles — resilience and redundancy. In developed countries like the U.S., where resiliency is underway all along the West Coast, and in Japan, which has some of the most rigor- ous building codes in the world, that’s possible. But in underdeveloped countries such as Nepal, or in cash-strapped nations like Iraq and Iran, where a border quake struck and killed hundreds in November 2017, resilience is much more difficult to attain. And Pehlivan admits as much. “It comes back to what you can afford,” she said. “They do not have access to better resources. It’s unfortunate that is the case. It is a chal- lenge.” Another challenge is that earthquake science is young and constantly
evolving. “Every single earthquake teaches us something,” Pehlivan said. “That’s how we advance the field.” And while the body of knowledge is ever expanding, scientists and engineers have not figured out a way to predict exactly where and when a quake will erupt. As a result, people from Seattle to Istanbul are wait- ing on “the big one,” but have no idea when that time will come. “It’s very difficult to model Mother Nature,” Pehlivan said. “We don’t know where it is going to happen.” A big distinction in the field lies with hazard versus risk. While some parts of the world might be at a high hazard for earthquakes, the risk might be low. This is the case in a sparsely populated area. The issue is complicated by high-population regions with dense cores and urban sprawl. Enter the earthquake engineers, the awareness they create, and the knowledge they bring to the table. “We cannot change Mother Nature, but we can improve our risk,” Pehlivan said. To expand the body of data, it’s necessary to head out into the field to collect real-world information that cannot be simulated in a laboratory. In her 2015 trip to Nepal, captured in a first-person account published in 2016 in Civil Engineering magazine, Pehlivan described her experi- ences as part of the team sent by the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance Association.
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csengineermag.com
february 2018
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