DesignSafe Radio

What does it mean to do “reconnaissance” after a natural disaster? To find out, host Dan Zehner catches up with Ellen Rathje, an earthquake engineer at the University of Texas, Austin. Among her many interests, Rathje is a founding member and co-chair of the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association (http://www.geerassociation.org). Rathje explains that although she originally...

This week Dan meets storm chaser Warren Causey, founder of The Sirens Project. Causey, an engineer with a lifelong passion for weather, studies tornadoes from a safe distance, using unmanned aerial vehicles, drones. In the interview, Causey describes growing up in Georgia and chasing storms in the mountainous Southeast, in Dixie Alley. Hoping to design weather research systems, he studied mechanic...

Host Dan Zehner interviews Crystal Felima, a social anthropologist who focuses on natural hazard risks and recovery in Haiti. She collects stories from residents to better understand the country’s responses to hurricanes, flooding and earthquakes. Currently, Felima is a PhD candidate at the University of Florida at Gainesville. By providing a social understanding of how disasters affect vulnerable...

This week, host Dan Zehner catches up with Tom Iovino, the public information director for the Florida Department of Health in Manatee County. Iovino, who mans the county’s emergency operations center during hurricanes, talks about storm preparation in the Tampa Bay area and about what he learned from Hurricane Irma. Although the Florida forecast was dire, precipitating the largest evacuation in t...

Nick Mrzlak from Team Rubicon joins Dan Zehner to talk about this unusual disaster-relief organization. We learn about the group’s trick of teaming veterans and first responders and its mission to focus on the underserved. With his background of serving in the U.S. Navy, working as an emergency medical technician, teaching EMTs, and volunteering with FEMA, Mrzlak is skilled and eager to help. A vo...

Host Dan Zehner talks with Dr. Jamey Jacob of Oklahoma State University about his research on how tornadoes form using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)to gather data by flying through thunderstorms. This research has been going on since the 1960s, but most of us heard about it during the 1990s with the movie Twister. The real 'Toto' that inspired the movie is actually at the National Weather Servic...

Host Dan Zehner talks with scientists whose jobs are forecasting and planning for stormsurge and flooding. Coastal engineer Cheryl Ann Blain works in the oceanography division in the Office of Naval Research. David Johnson is a professor of engineering and political science at Purdue University. At the Naval Research Lab in Mississippi, Blain develops storm surge models and forecasts with the ADCI...

DesignSafe Radio host Dan Zehner catches up with Dr. John Vidale, renowned geophysicist and seismologist. Until recently, Vidale directed the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. Now he directs the Southern California Earthquake Center at USCCS. He discusses highlights of his research career. As a college physics student, he became enamored with geology – taking 11 geology courses in his senior year...

For two engineering undergrads from Puerto Rico, working on the beach is a dream job. In this week’s edition of DesignSafe Radio, host Dan Zehner meets up with these two students, who took part in NHERI’s 2017 Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Civil engineering students Hector Colon Delacruz and Peter Rivera Casillas talk to host Dan Zehner about their summer working at Oregon State...

In this special episode on NHERI's response to Hurricane Harvey, I talk with Dr. Brian Phillips from the University of Maryland who traveled with the NHERI team from the University of Florida (led by Dr. Forrest Masters and his colleagues) to deploy truck mounted sensor towers ahead of the storm. They were able to capture ground level wind speed measurements of the eye of the storm as it hit land...

Today on this special episode as Hurricane Irma comes closer, we talk with Tom Iovino, Public Information Director at Florida Department of Health in Manatee County about hurricane preparedness, where to find quality information, and the latest on Irma as the storm approaches. You can find his recommendations for information below: National Hurricane Center: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/#Irma Florida E...

Profile of Elaina Sutley(https://ceae.ku.edu/elaina-j-sutley), structural engineer and assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Kansas. In her research, she focuses on multiple aspects of designing hazard-proof wood structures, including seismic safety in low-income housing. Sutley relates her “origin story” about becoming a structural engineer — with a public policy bent. She...

On this special episode covering Hurricane Harvey and the NHERI network's commitment to science during this extreme event, host Dan Zehner talks with Dr. Clint Dawson of the University of Texas at Austin about his team's work in storm surge forecast modelling over his career. They have developed one of only two high fidelity models of coastal storm surge that experts use for forecasting and local...

In this episode, host Dan Zehner talks with UC San Diego’s Darren McKay, development engineer and operations manager for LHPOST, the world’s largest outdoor shake table. The shake table, part of the UCSD Jacobs School of Civil Engineering, is one of NHERI’s 8 experimental facilities. At McKay’s site, researchers “build big.” They construct full-scale and near-full scale structures, often multiple-...

Get ready for Hurricane Harvey! If you aren't prepared already, get that way and get safe. Here are some last minute preparations you can do, good sources of information, and how you can help those who are in the path. Hurricane kit: Medication Cash Battery powered radio First aid supplies Bottled water Flashlight Cell phone car charger Credible info sources: National Weather Service: http://www.n...

Today I talked with Dr. Arindham Chowdhury and Dr. Maryam Refan from the Wall of Wind at Florida International University. Dr. Refan shared some great stories from her research career including how her storm chasing truck got hit with a piece of a wind turbine, creating a tornado in a laboratory setting, and how wind engineering research can focus on using wind to generate energy or prevent damage...

Here's the full version of my interview with Dr. Pedro Lomonaco from Oregon State University's O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab! We went into a few more topics than we could fit into one episode on the full length version of this.

On today's episode, I talked with Dr. Pedro Lomonaco from Oregon State University about coastal engineering and his work at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory. He has a wealth of experience in this area and loves to talk about it! In fact, we had more to talk about than could fit in an episode, so the full interview will be published separately.

Dr. Julio Ramirez talks about how he got interested in Civil Engineering as a boy following his dad to job sites in Mexico, and has turned that into a career dedicated to designing resilient structures. We talk about the amazing facilities that make up the NHERI network and how the team is bringing together the earthquake, geotechnical, wind, and coastal engineering communities to do multi-hazard...