EERI Plans
Reconnaissance Team
A large team of EERI members and colleagues will be traveling to Chile next week to document the effects of the massive 8.8 earthquake that struck that country on February 27th. Under the leadership of Professor Jack Moehle of UC Berkeley, EERI is sending this team to bring back lessons for practice and academia in both the U.S. and Chile. Joining Moehle in providing leadership for the overall reconnaissance effort are EERI member Professor Rafael Riddell of the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and Professor Ruben Boroschek of the University of Chile. The team is organized under the umbrella of EERI’s Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) Program, which is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Many partnering organizations are providing travel support for the LFE team members, including NEES, PEER and many of the individual agencies, organizations and firms represented on the team. In addition to the EERI team, the Geo-Engineering in Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association is sending a team, as is the Technical Council on Lifelines Earthquake Engineering of ASCE, the Structural Engineering Institute of ASCE, and the Federal Highway Administration. Several tsunami and earth science teams will also be traveling to Chile to capture lessons. In addition, some of EERI’s subscribing member firms have teams in the field, including Degenkolb Engineers and RMS.
The EERI team will gather lessons from these other groups, and will regularly post field observations and photographs on this Chile Clearinghouse site.
