Infrastructure in Peril by Richard Fosse, P.E.

Fosse, Richard

Faculty/Staff/Researcher

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Infrastructure Resilience and Emergency Response

2012-05-26

2020 submissions

Iowa City Landfill, Iowa City, IA

The September 11th attacks were an awakening for our nation to the importance of resilience and the way we respond to large scale disasters. In the years since, it has become evident that the most likely threats to our infrastructure come from extreme weather events and accidents, such as the fire at the Iowa City landfill pictured above. The frequency of such events, especially those weather related, has been increasing at an alarming rate over the past 20 years. Civil and environmental engineers design the infrastructure systems that comprise our communities. My focus has been to better prepare engineers to play a central role in creating the next generation of infrastructure that will help break the cycle of destruction and repair that can be seen all to often on the nightly news. By teaching our students how to focus on resilience, they can identify potential threats and design safeguards, including features to accommodate quicker recovery after a disaster. Our students are also taught about their role as a responder. Damage to critical infrastructure systems thrusts engineers into a responder role to provide immediate evaluation and creative strategies to restore basic functions. The curriculum developed and taught at the University of Iowa is on the leading edge of the emerging field of resilience and has been featured at the American Society of Civil Engineers Congress on Technical Advancement and FEMA's Emergency Management Higher Education Symposium.

Honorable Mention in the 2020 Faculty/Staff/Researchers Category

infrastructure
resilience
response

Capture Your Research

University of Iowa. Lichtenberger Engineering Library
University of Iowa. College of Engineering. NEXUS Program
Virgil M. Hancher Auditorium

Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Contact Kari Kozak in the Litchenberger Engineering Library at the University of Iowa: http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/eng/contact/

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