The Faculty of Engineering at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU) has had the results of a decade of research, which charts its involvement in a multi-university project on the Beirut explosion, featured at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America (SSA).
The project, which began in 2010 as the Seismic risk assessment for Beirut LIBRIS project with the University of Grenoble Alpes, USJ and the Lebanese University, surveyed buildings in Beirut for their vulnerability to earthquakes. "We were able to estimate what was the approximate cost of damage for a hypothetical earthquake of magnitude 7," said Dr. Jacques Harb, Dean of Faculty of Engineering and Professor at the NDU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We then investigated the impact on the transportation sector during emergency and located the zones of high population density with the accessibility to the nearest medical centers.”
When the Beirut Explosion hit, it provided Dr. Harb and his team a unique chance to test the hypotheses. "We saw the similarity of disaster management and wanted to extract valuable lessons," said Dr. Harb. "With the help of some students, we re-surveyed some buildings in the blast vicinity and observed some variations in the material properties. In parallel the social investigators worked on a questionnaire to pinpoint how people will react when a disaster occurs."
The results of this survey were published in the form of a poster and abstract, which were both featured at the SSA’s annual meeting. The next stages of the project are already underway with Dr. Harb saying, "With the help of our colleagues from Grenoble, a network of seismic stations is being implemented in some buildings. One of the stations will be installed at NDU and it is now in my office."