Cornell disaster expert O'Rourke named to panel on effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans


O'Rourke

Thomas O'Rourke, the Thomas R. Briggs Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University, has been named to a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the adequacy of hurricane protection infrastructure in New Orleans.

The committee will provide an independent review of the government's interagency investigation of the disaster. A primary study is to be conducted by an Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, or IPET, headed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and including representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The group is also working with an external review panel from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

The group O'Rourke is joining was created at the request of the Department of the Army to ensure an open and unbiased review of the study, O'Rourke said. The committee will consist of 16 scientists and engineers from academia and industry, none of whom have any ties to the Corps of Engineers or any other entity with a stake in New Orleans infrastructure. G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Institute of Technology, will chair the committee.

The panel's job will be to review the work of the IPET and ASCE teams to ensure correctness of their data and consistency with accepted engineering approaches and practices. They will review the teams' conclusions and seek to determine lessons learned from Katrina and to identify ways that hurricane protection system performance can be improved in the future "at the authorized level of protection."

"As I understand it," O'Rourke said, "The interagency group is supposed to get the facts, the ASCE group is to do its best to verify those facts, and our job is to synthesize them."

At Cornell, O'Rourke conducts research on the effect of earthquakes, wind and other disasters on infrastructure, with a focus on underground utilities. He has studied the effects of the World Trade Center collapse in New York City in September 2001 and the recent subway bombings in London.

The committee will issue two preliminary reports in February and June, and a final report in September, following the final report of the IPET and ASCE teams. The final IPET/ASCE report on structural performance of the hurricane protection system is due in May.

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