CU earthquake expert Tom O'Rourke was stuck in Mexico when tsunami hit

By Larry Klaes

When the massive Indian Ocean tsunami began inundating the coastline of Sumatra, Indonesia, on Dec. 26, Thomas O'Rourke was on his way to Mexico on a family vacation.

On arriving just north of Tulum in Mexico, O'Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor of Engineering at Cornell's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a world expert on earthquake engineering, was caught up in the post-Christmas air traffic snarl, with lost luggage and long-delayed flights to his destination.

More important, as the outgoing president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), the pre-eminent organization for earthquake engineering in the United States, he was out of touch with his organization. He had no way to communicate with other heads of the National Science Foundation-supported EERI, whose job is to organize and send earthquake reconnaissance teams to the sites of major disasters such as the tsunami.

It took almost two days before O'Rourke could communicate with the organization via cell phone and the Internet.

O'Rourke was relieved to find that the EERI was well organized and dealing effectively with the tsunami disaster by the time he finally got through. This was important news because the event was "so large that lots of care and consideration had to be put into the planning of this," explained O'Rourke.

The EERI reconnaissance teams' first assignment was to study the effects of the tsunami by supporting team members in the field. One team was led by O'Rourke's colleague, civil engineering Professor Philip Liu, who went to Sri Lanka and Thailand just days after the tsunami to survey and report on the destruction. Read the story.

The second role for the reconnaissance teams was to survey the social, economic and political impacts of the disaster and the recovery process. This role, O'Rourke said, is an example of the multidisciplinary reach of the teams' work, since the recovery process includes rebuilding and re-establishing the infrastructure of the devastated communities, including their social structure.

"One thing we learn from a disaster is how people respond to it and how we can do it better in the future," said O'Rourke. "It is not just engineering that is involved in rebuilding their lives."

The third role for the EERI teams involves remote sensing -- in essence, studying the overall picture of the tsunami's effects across the world. "This disaster had a global impact, which was perceptible from outer space," said O'Rourke. "With high-resolution satellite imagery, we may be able to estimate wave damage for thousands of miles of shoreline."

The fourth role is to study how the tsunami has affected lifeline systems such as water supplies, electric power, rail, highways, ports and harbors. The lifeline teams currently are en route to India and Sri Lanka.