Planet Earth is both highly populated and increasingly unsettled with respect to natural hazards. Population expansion exposes large numbers of people and expanses of infrastructure to extreme events such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, and wildfires. These and other disasters can ...

New York is what it is because we built it that way. The Erie Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Holland Tunnel—these engineering marvels exemplify the bold spirit that characterized New York for decades. And the New York subway system was no different. Opened in 1904, ...

Each year, governments and the private sector invest trillions of dollars in infrastructure that may not withstand future risks from climate change (Oxford Economics 2017). Most of the world’s new infrastructure will be built in developing countries, which face the dual challenges of disaster ...

Urban economies depend on shared infrastructure for water, power, communications, and transportation. This critical infrastructure can be impaired by design and construction flaws, deterioration over time, obsolescence, accidents, and excess demand, but this article focuses on damage from natural ...

The hurricane and flood disasters of recent decades have created a paradigm shift in how engineers approach natural hazards. The federal and some local governments have moved from standards-based approaches to developing risk-informed project plans, recognizing the importance of uncertainty in ...

The concept of community resilience is complex and multidimensional, relying on engineering and other disciplines to help communities break the cycle of destruction and recovery and reduce the impacts of earthquakes and other hazards. This article presents proposed prioritized actions to improve ...

Common to the many definitions of resilience in the literature and in policy statements is the notion that resilience is the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. The performance of the built environment and the support of ...

Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation and home to the largest US port, is subject to some of the greatest risks from natural disasters. It is situated among the eight counties of Southern California where more than 150 fault segments are each capable of generating a damaging earthquake ...

Southern California is home to over 19 million residents who rely on three independently owned and operated aqueduct systems that provide on average 50 percent of the region’s annual water needs. The three aqueducts import water from outside the region and cross the San Andreas Fault. The ...

Risk is an inevitability of the modern condition, deeply woven into technological society and the built environment. An ethical approach to engineering requires looking beyond the technological calculation of risks to ask probing questions about impacts on individuals and society in terms of ...

RON LATANISION (RML): Thank you for joining us today. We’re delighted to have this opportunity to speak with you, and happy to have an electrical engineer who is involved with the World Bank and finance and all kinds of things. How did you choose to study electrical engineering?

EKUA BENTIL: ...