Safe, disaster-resilient housing is critical to our way of life, prosperity and sense of security. Yet, despite decades of advances in technologies for engineering resilient housing, houses remain particularly vulnerable to damage from earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, fires and other hazards, and this loss of housing has long-term community impacts, affecting workforce availability, economic prosperity, and public health, and exacerbating housing shortages. This talk will first explore housing safety challenges in multihazard environments, using probabilistic performance assessments to characterize structural safety. Arguing that how residents perceive housing safety affects how structures are designed, built or maintained, it will also describe work done to characterize households’ perceptions of hurricane and earthquake safety. By comparing the structural performance assessments with the household perceptions, it will conclude by exploring how household perceptions of safety align – or misalign – with scientific and engineering knowledge, highlighting opportunities for changing how we design, build and maintain housing structures.
Abbie Liel (she/her) is a Professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She earned undergraduate degrees in Civil Engineering, and in the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Abbie did her Ph.D. at Stanford University, focusing on collapse risk of older non-ductile concrete frame structures. At CU, Abbie has worked on problems related to seismic safety of concrete buildings, snow loads on structures, earthquake-induced liquefaction and mitigation strategies, induced seismicity, hurricane-resistant housing, and diversity and inclusion in the structural engineering profession. She has been the recipient of the Shah Family Innovation Prize from the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, and recently received the College of Engineering’s Charles A. Hutchinson Memorial Teaching Award. Abbie is also Associate Chair for Administration in the Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering department.