Turning excess office space into apartments isn’t a panacea for the housing shortage, but it’s producing thousands of new units yearly and is more sustainable and economical than new construction.
The best science is not always the best engineering when it comes to building codes. It’s also a problem across the US, as an engineer who works on disaster resilience explains.
February earthquakes wreaked havoc across Turkey and Syria, killing tens of thousands of people. An engineer originally from Turkey describes what kept some buildings functional while others collapsed.
Texas wasn’t prepared to keep the lights on during Winter Storm Uri, and it won’t be ready for future cold weather unless it starts thinking about energy demand as well as supply.
We must take significant and rapid action now, to ensure cities play their part in limiting dangerous global warming and withstand the climate challenges ahead.
Today’s building codes were implemented as a result of devastating natural disasters that resulted in the loss of human lives and billions of dollars. But they aren’t retroactively applied.
In 1989, Newcastle was hit by Australia’s deadliest earthquake, but high-rise development in the city’s CBD has continued nonetheless. Australia needs a consistent planning code for earthquake risk.
99% of people below the floors where the planes struck the twin towers evacuated successfully, although their journey was fraught with danger. Their stories have influenced today’s skyscraper designs.
Investigators are searching for what caused the tall apartment building near Miami to suddenly fail. What they find could lead to changes in building codes.
NOAA released its list of climate and weather disasters that cost the nation more than $1 billion each. Like many climate and weather events this past year, it shattered the record.
Buildings aren’t the only things at risk in wildfires. Recent disasters in California have left local water system contaminated with toxic chemicals afterward, slowing return and recovery.
Nepal’s past dealing with multiple disasters, including the aftermath of its civil war and the massive earthquake of 2015 may have helped the country prepare for the current COVID-19 crisis.
Professor of Civil, Environmental & Ecological Engineering, Director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, Purdue University