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.
Destroyed buildings in San Francisco, Calif., after the 1906 earthquake.
(H.D. Chadwick/Wikimedia Commons)
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.
The collapse of Champlain Towers is one of the worst building failures in recent memory.
AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
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.
In a year tied for the warmest on record globally, the U.S. was hit with costly hurricanes, wildfires, storms and drought.
AP Photo/Noah Berger and Gerald Herbert
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.
Thermal image of New York City’s first passive house on a -10 C degree night.
(Shutterstock)
Two environmental engineers say governments need to do more to protect people from possible water contamination after wildfires.
The 2018 Camp Fire north of Sacramento burned everything in its path: cars, power lines, and buildings – and contaminated local drinking water.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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.
Domestic migrants work at a construction site in Dhading, Nepal. February 2020.
(Sara Shneiderman)
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.
The proposed law does little to give people confidence in the apartments they buy. And it utterly neglects the role of architects and on-site inspections in delivering sound buildings.
Rather than mandating the building of houses that are less likely to burn down, we should be mandating the provision of good shelters.
ANDREW BROWNBILL/AAP
While the bushfire crisis might provoke a sense of urgency to rebuild, we need to stop and properly plan where and how we construct buildings and open spaces.
Professor of Civil, Environmental & Ecological Engineering, Director of the Healthy Plumbing Consortium and Center for Plumbing Safety, Purdue University