Oakland, California, 1989

CCRM Professors Astaneh, Bea and Seed featured in the September/October issue of the California Magazine

In the September/October 2007 issue of the California Magazine, in an article entitled "Bureaucratic Maze: Collapsed Freeway is Just the Beginning," Eric Simons talks with Professors Astaneh and Bea about their respective work on Mac Arthur Maze Fire Collapse (2007) and the Katrina catastrophe (2005). Professor Seed was a lead investigator in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  Both Astaneh and Bea are researchers at, and two of the founding faculty of, the multi-disciplinary Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM). Below are excerpts from the article:

"Abolhassan Astaneh won’t drive over the repaired portion of the MacArthur Maze until Caltrans proves it’s safe. The Berkeley professor of structural engineering has investigated disasters all over the world, including the collapse of the World Trade Center, and says that most of what you read about the successful reconstruction of the freeway interchange at the eastern end of the Bay Bridge is plain wrong......
Astaneh and his colleagues from the Center for Catastrophic Risk Management have investigated more than 600 disasters, including the Exxon Valdez, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the crash of the Concorde jet near Paris, and Hurricane Katrina. And they say they’ve found a common theme: hubris beforehand, hubris afterward, and a lot of things not working in between.  Robert Bea, co-director of the CCRM, sees troubling parallels between the Maze reconstruction and Hurricane Katrina. ..." The full article is at:
http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california/200709/praxismaze.asp

About CCRM

The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM) is part of the University's response to recent disasters—and our efforts to anticipate future ones. CCRM was started by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, and has become part of the Institute of Business and Economic Research to emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of its research team.

Created in September 2005 after Hurricane Katrina, CCRM includes faculty in Civil and Environmental Engineering with backgrounds in levee failure (New Orleans), structural failure (World Trade Center), earthquakes, and design of high reliability systems. They are joined by faculty from Architecture, City & Regional Planning, Business, Public Health, Law and Public Policy and from a new center at the University of Aix-en-Provence, France.

Their goal: to improve the safety and resilience of physical and social infrastructure in the face of disaster. Their mission: through multidisciplinary research, teaching and outreach, to help societies cope better with catastrophic hazards including hurricane, tornado, flood, tsunami, earthquake, volcano, landslide, wildfire, pandemic, industrial accident, chemical spill, blackout and terrorism attack. Preparations for catastrophic events come in many forms: disaster prevention and preparedness; urban infrastructure renewal and resilience; emergency decision-making; public health crisis management; recovery of impacted communities; domestic security; environmental management after crisis.

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View Rune Storesund's poster on Utilization of Terrestrial LiDAR in Reliability-Based Levee Operation and Maintenance. Available in Adobe PDF and Macromedia Flash format.