Being a part of broader civil engineering and built environment sciences, we have the unique opportunity to learn from other "sister" disciplines, rather than coming up with everything on our own. Especially, when those disciplines have 100+ years of experience in investigating stuff that has recently emerged as one of the leading challenges in our field.

The other discipline is Earthquake Engineering.

The interesting stuff - community resilience and managing safety across tens of thousands of buildings exposed to the same hazard.

Our field of application - Fire Safety of WUI communitites.

And most importantly, my diligent guests: Negar Elhami-Khorasani from University at Buffalo, and Justin Moresco from Applied Technology Council.

In this episode we discuss how earthquake engineering deals with hazards through four steps:

1. Hazard assessment,
2. System response (exposure)
3. Damage assessment (vulnerability)
4. Level of loss (consequences)

You will learn what are fragility functions and how they are applied. We will also discuss building archetypes and how we can use them to increase or decrease the level of detail in our analysis.

If you want more:

• Conceptualizing a probabilistic risk and loss assessment framework for wildfires
• Toward Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Wildland–Urban Interface Communities for Wildfires

Recommended follow-up podcast episodes:

• 156 - Trigger Boundaries with Harry Mitchell and Nick Kalogeropoulos
• 215 - Lessons from the 2018 Camp Fire with Eric D. Link
• 222 - Integrating WUI risk management and fire safety engineering with Pascale Vacca

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.