MUITI-HAZARD MITIGATION: A NEW FRONTIER IN EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING

摘要

Earthquake engineering and hazard mitigation research is a cluster of integrated activities involving engineers, social scientists, etc. It has played a leadership role, among others, in advancing the state-of-the-art in structural engineering practice against natural hazards during the second half of the 20th century. Catastrophic failures of World Trade Center Buildings on September 11, 2001 and devastating losses due to the Great Sumatra/Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004 further highlight the complexity of such man-made and natural hazards, and the importance of new, integrated approaches to multiple hazards reduction. Protection of major public infrastructures has thus added a new challenge to engineering design and construction of "multi-hazard resilient" physical systems. This paper articulates an approach to design such built systems from a platform on the basis of earthquake engineering research accomplishments achieved to date. First, important milestones of earthquake engineering advances and accomplishments o-ver the past 50 years are briefly reviewed, including some significant international coop- erative efforts such as US-Japan and US-China research programs. Then, the potential application of some of these developments to other hazards is illustrated as examples. Finally, some challenges to develop multi-hazard mitigation technologies are noted to illustrate the wide-open future research opportunities for the structural and hazard engineering communities.