Brad Wham News

Brad Wham shares key findings from post-earthquake reconnaissance in Turkey

Anonymous — Fri, 05 May 2023 21:11:12 +0000

Brad Wham shares key findings from post-earthquake reconnaissance in Turkey Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 05/05/2023 - 15:11

Susan Glairon

If you watch

Who: Anyone interested in the earthquake and its impacts. The webinar is especially relevant to those in the transportation, energy, water or wastewater sectors.

What: The EERI Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes Lifelines Reconnaissance Webinar focuses on the impact of lifelines and features members of the Lifelines reconnaissance team, including Wham.

Where: Webinar, recorded May 9, 2023.

Brad Wham, assistant research professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, was a member of one of the three Learning From Earthquakes (LFE) reconnaissance teams that traveled to Turkey in March to assess the impacts of the Feb. 6 Kahramanmaraş earthquake. The 7.8- and 7.7-magnitude earthquakes caused massive destruction of property and infrastructure. More than 50,000 people were killed.

Wham’s team focused on “lifelines” — distributed infrastructure that facilitates the functioning of society — including water and wastewater systems, transportation, and energy generation and distribution. During their seven days in the field, the teams traveled more than 3,000 miles in vans and visited 170 sites to document both the infrastructure that performed well and that didn’t perform well.

The first reconnaissance report — a joint effort by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) and Geotechnical Extreme Event Report (GEER) — became publicly available May 6, the three-month anniversary of the earthquake. The report, which includes a 55-page “short” summary of the lifeline team’s observations, provides guidance to industry stakeholders and the academic community, including identifying follow-up research activities that would be useful to better understand the earthquake’s impact.

What led to your conducting research in Turkey after the earthquake?
I have been fortunate to serve on various teams that have visited areas after earthquakes and other natural hazards. In terms of Turkey, EERI asked me to join the lifelines team to document the successes and challenges and share the lessons learned with the engineering and academic communities.

What parts of Turkey did you visit?
The first half of our operation was based in Adana, in the southern part of Turkey. The second half was based out of Gaziantep. While operating out of those two cities, we visited a large part of the affected region. However, it’s impossible to see everything — it’s a four- to five-hour drive on good roads from the north to the south of the impacted region.

Some of the other cities we visited included Antakya, which experienced significant building collapse; Iskenderun, located along the Mediterranean with severe soil liquefaction damage; and Kahramanmaraş, the earthquake’s namesake.

What was the goal of your research?
The mission was to rapidly document the impacts and identify research questions before information was lost due to repairs and debris removal, which typically happens quickly after major events. The primary objective was to understand the impact of the natural hazard, not only the magnitude of damage to individual components and systems, but also the actions taken by utilities to return basic levels of service, impediments or successes that influenced restoration time and the overall impact on society and community recovery.

It’s also important to identify topics that should be further investigated over various time scales, and help to justify funding those investigations. We hope our work will encourage other teams to continue valuable research activities and improve resilience to natural hazards.

What were some of the key findings?
Our team specifically looked at lifeline systems, including energy, transportation, water and wastewater, universities, schools and other industrial facilities, to try to understand their performance and impact on people. You may be able to go home if your house is standing, but if you don't have water, sewer, power, natural gas or roads/bridges to get you home — each of these systems impact your ability to resume life, operate businesses and resume civilization.

Many lifeline systems that were seismically designed performed well. For instance, the electric power did reasonably well, the collapse of large dams was avoided and power-generation facilities did pretty good overall. Roadways, airports and bridges were damaged in certain areas, but the ones that were designed and built after the 1999 earthquake in Turkey performed relatively well.

However, some of the other systems were not built to the highest standards. For instance, the water distribution systems were significantly damaged, making it difficult to get water to the population. Many wastewater treatment facilities are still inoperable, and if you can’t treat wastewater, it goes into the local waterways. While drinking water systems are pressurized such that leaks can sometimes be identified, it’s difficult to identify where damages and repairs are needed in gravity flow wastewater pipelines. It’s going to be a long recovery process in order to bring back proper sanitation services.

The water treatment plants were generally operable, but due to water pipeline damage and other issues, many residents question whether it’s safe to drink the water.

Did anything surprise you?
Transmission lines that carry water long distances into metropolitan areas are extremely important infrastructure components. In some instances, 9-foot diameter pipelines crossed faults through tunnels and interacted with other underground utilities, like gas transmission lines. Many were damaged during the earthquake due to 4- or 5-m fault offsets, but one of the biggest surprises was the ability of the Turkish utilities to repair these pipelines rapidly despite significant damages.

Turkish utilities were able to get the water supply returned to many cities relatively rapidly, and although the treatment level was questionable, at least water for firefighting and non potable uses became available. It was pretty incredible, especially considering the staffing challenges. One large utility had 2,500 employees. After the Turkey earthquake, the utility struggled to get 200 people to report to work. Everyone was looking for lost family members, trying to figure out if their houses were still there, and protecting their property from looters. Many utility staff perished in the earthquake. Availability of staff was not an issue typically considered and emphasized the importance of establishing rapid mutual support programs with surrounding national and international organizations.

Did any of your findings in Turkey relate to your Marshall Fire research?
Both disasters had similar types of interdependencies where the loss of one service affects others. For example, in Turkey some water pumping and treatment facilities didn’t have backup generators. The lack of electric power and natural gas affected the ability of the water system to provide services, which was also a challenge during the Marshall Fire (in Colorado). Also, some transportation systems were damaged, preventing the delivery of resources and limiting access to critical facilities (e.g., dams) for inspection. During the Marshall Fire, some routes were inaccessible, impeding the ability to respond to the fire.

Are there lessons from the Turkey earthquake that could be applied to the United States?
The Turkey earthquakes remind us of the importance of lifelines and their role in recovering from a large event. It’s important to learn from well-performing sites as well as damaged ones.

If we were to have a similar magnitude earthquake in the U.S., we hope that our buildings, as well as infrastructure systems, would perform better. That said, Turkey has modern cities with similar infrastructure systems to the U.S., and in many cases newer. Many of the sites we visited were built in the last 20 years and were designed with earthquakes in mind, and that was apparent in their performance in many situations. In the U.S., it's important to recognize that many of our lifeline systems are aging; continual assessment and improvements are vital to regular operation and recovery following natural disasters.

Photo captions:
Top photo: Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham, far right, stands with members of his Lifeline team in front of water transmission pipelines damaged by fault ruptures in Gaziantep, Turkey.
Lower photo: Collapsed power transmission tower in Hatay, Turkey.

Brad Wham, assistant research professor in CU Boulder’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, was a member of one of the three Learning From Earthquakes (LFE) reconnaissance teams that traveled to Turkey in March to assess the impacts of the Feb. 6 Kahramanmaraş earthquake. The team specifically looked at lifeline systems, including energy, transportation, water and wastewater.

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Brad Wham presents at JWWA/WRF/CTWWA Water System Seismic Conference Program

Anonymous — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 23:23:06 +0000

Brad Wham presents at JWWA/WRF/CTWWA Water System Seismic Conference Program Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/06/2023 - 16:23

Assistant Research Professor Brad P. Wham presented at the 12th annual Water System Seismic Conference, hosted by Japan Water Works Association and co-sponsored by the Water Research Foundation (US) & Chinese Taiwan Water Works Association, Jan. 30 - Feb. 1, 2023 in Kumamoto on the island of Kyushu, Japan. His talk, titled “Evaluation of Assessment Procedures for Hazard-Resilient Expansion Joints “ highlighted unique experimental testing performed at CIEST and included lessons learned from reconnaissance missions conducted following the 2016 Kumamoto and 2018 Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquakes. Wham also joined water utilities from around the Pacific to witness testing of a 54-inch diameter earthquake-resilient ductile iron expansion joint, conducted by Kubota Corp.

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What is the Center for Infrastructure, Energy, and Space Testing at CU Boulder?

Anonymous — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 20:36:22 +0000

What is the Center for Infrastructure, Energy, and Space Testing at CU Boulder? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/24/2023 - 13:36

Jeff Zehnder

Welcome to the Center for Infrastructure, Energy, and Space Testing (CIEST) at CU Boulder, an experimental facility offering geotechnical centrifuges, structural dynamics and materials testing and research for business, government, and academic partners.

CIEST is home to a massive array of cutting edge, specialized facilities to conduct small and large scale testing with equipment, testbeds and instrumentation unrivaled in the United States.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlyBN4IJlK8]

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This scientist fled a deadly wildfire, then returned to study how it happened

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 21:58:46 +0000

This scientist fled a deadly wildfire, then returned to study how it happened Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/20/2023 - 14:58

In 2021, the devastating Marshall Fire showed wildfire can strike Colorado in almost any place or season. Scientists like Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham now hope to glean lessons from it for communities across the West.

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Researchers in Colorado talk improvements to potentially save homes from wildfires

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 23:35:54 +0000

Researchers in Colorado talk improvements to potentially save homes from wildfires Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/29/2022 - 16:35

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Wildfires pose growing threat to drinking water systems

Anonymous — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 22:57:39 +0000

Wildfires pose growing threat to drinking water systems Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/03/2022 - 16:57

In this American Society of Civil Engineers article, Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham talks about the steps water utilities can take to protect their infrastructure from wildfires.

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Engineers deploy drones to survey Marshall Fire, gather lessons for future disasters

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 16:09:41 +0000

Engineers deploy drones to survey Marshall Fire, gather lessons for future disasters Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/14/2022 - 09:09

The drone whirs to life on a driveway in the Spanish Hills neighborhood of Boulder County. Its four spinning motors lift it to nearly 200 feet above the ground. Below, the cul-de-sac comes into view, revealing the stone chimneys and blackened foundations that dot the hillside—what remains of many of the houses in this neighborhood after flames swept through on Dec. 30 and into the morning of Dec. 31 during what would become known as the Marshall Fire.

Brad Wham trudges through the snow to join about a dozen other researchers who have gathered to watch the flight this morning. They’re wearing hard hats and neon safety vests. As an engineer at CU Boulder, Wham studies how water pipelines and other “lifelines” can maintain their functionality during natural hazards, such as earthquakes and wildfires. He also lives in Louisville, Colorado, and had to evacuate his own home on that same day.

“I’ve deployed to Japan and New Zealand to study disasters very shortly after they occurred,” said Wham, an assistant research professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering (CEAE). “It has been a different experience to have them happen in my hometown.”

The Marshall Fire, which spread throughout much of Boulder County including the towns of Superior and Louisville, became the most destructive fire in Colorado’s history. More than 1,000 homes were lost, and approximately 6,000 acres burned. One person remains missing while another was confirmed dead.

In coordination with local officials, Wham and his colleagues from Oregon State and Purdue universities have been surveying the damage since first-responders extinguished the flames. The effort is part an initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) called Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER), which deploys researchers to disaster sites around the world. The team hopes to better understand the disaster from a uniquely engineering perspective: Why did some houses burn, for example, while neighboring homes survived? How did critical services like water, gas and electricity hold up during one of the worst disasters in Boulder County’s history?

Time is of the essence. Soon, bulldozers and excavators will crawl through the impacted areas to begin the slow process of rebuilding—and much of that information will be gone forever.

“I think that what we’re doing here is going to be beneficial in the future, especially with other communities that are going to have fires,” said Jessica Ramos, a senior at CU Boulder who’s working on Wham’s research team.

The Marshall Fire swept through this cul-de-sac in the Spanish Hills neighborhood. (Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder)

Heat map

More information

For CU Boulder community members experiencing physical, financial or emotional impacts of the Marshall Fire, CU Boulder fire resources are available.

Fire resources

CONVERGE is hosting a series of virtual forums to discuss research on the Marshall Fire. Tune in for the next forum on Thursday, Feb. 17 from 2-3:00 p.m. Mountain Time.

Join the forum

Erica Fischer, a structural engineering professor at Oregon State University who leads the GEER team along with Wham, joined the researchers in Spanish Hills on this windy morning in January.

In many ways, the neighborhood shows why people have flocked to Boulder County in recent decades. Its rolling hills offer a startling view of the CU Boulder campus and the Flatirons beyond. But, Fischer notes, wildfires have been an inescapable part of these kinds of beautiful landscapes since long before humans settled here—and, as the climate warms in Colorado, they’re likely to grow worse.

“I would love to have this view,” she says, standing on a snowy hillside. “This is incredible, but beautiful scenery is created out of disaster. That’s how mountains are formed. That’s how lush forests are created. Understanding that is important.”

She and her colleagues are hoping to help people to live more safely within this dynamic environment.

They’re taking a multi-pronged approach to the research. They’ve utilized laser sensors to create 3D models of homes and retaining structures burned in the fire. They’ve also deployed flying vehicles like the quadcopter drones—on loan from the NSF-funded RAPID facility at the University of Washington.

This kind of interdisciplinary reconnaissance related to a wildfire has never been done before by GEER,” said Shideh Dashti, an associate professor in CEAE who leads an interdisciplinary research effort at CU Boulder called Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity. “The solutions we come up with need to be holistic.”

As one part of that fast-moving effort, the group is working to recreate a heat map of the path the fire took through towns like Superior and Louisville.

Fischer explained that as concrete heats up, it changes color, turning pinker the warmer it becomes. Students from Oregon and CU Boulder are inspecting the foundations of homes in the region, using custom-made color swatches to try to estimate how hot the flames got—giving them a better sense of what happened inside those homes as they burned.

Members of the GEER team watch a drone take off from the Spanish Hills neighborhood. (Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder)

Team members survey damage from the Marshall Fire. (Credit: Casey Cass/CU Boulder)

The team plans to publish its initial findings through a publicly-available report in March.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to bring together lessons learned from the Marshall Fire for other communities across the West. Fischer noted that recommendations like the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code and the National Fire Protection Agency's FireWise Program have long laid out how homeowners can safeguard homes from wildfires. Building a gravel skirt around your house, for example, can help to buffer it from flames. But many of those recommendations are expensive to put into place, she said, and no one knows which ones give you the biggest bang for your buck.

“In 2018, there was a big hailstorm in Boulder County. A lot of people replaced their roofs. Did certain roofing materials help more than others? Did some siding materials help more than others?” Fischer said. “If homeowners have one dollar for rebuilding, where should they put it?”

Urgent response

Wham understands the urgency of the effort. At 2 p.m. on Dec. 30, he packed a bag and left his house in Louisville as flames licked the ground just a couple hundred yards away. His house made it through the night, but many others nearby didn’t.

“The fire destroyed structures all around us, to the north, the west, the south,” he said from Spanish Hills, a mile and a half from his home. “But the response is the same as if it were in another community. We want to help in any way that we can. We want to support the local institutions that are making decisions to get people back to their homes and recover from this as safely and as efficiently as possible.”

As part of that, Wham and his colleagues are also striving to understand how humans responded to this unprecedented disaster. The team has interviewed emergency management personnel and other local leaders to learn more about the decisions they made during and after the fire—how did residents evacuate neighborhoods, and how did cities and the county prioritize restoring vital services? In Louisville, for example, the local water treatment plant lost power, natural gas and communication services during the fire, severely limiting its capacity to get water to firefighters. Local officials trucked in natural gas from the surrounding area to restore the facility’s critical water pressure demands.

Lori Peek is a sociologist who directs the Natural Hazards Center at CU Boulder and an associated NSF-funded effort called CONVERGE, which coordinates research on natural disasters. She has a lot of experience collecting perishable data in the immediate aftermath of events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 BP oil spill.

“One of the keys to doing ethical disaster research is making sure that work is grounded in the local cultural context,” Peek said. “This team multi-disciplinary team of engineers had those deep ties and has the opportunity to do grounded research that makes a scientific contribution but is also immediately useful to local leaders.”

Wham, for his part, has already taken one big lesson away from the Marshall Fire.

“People from all over the state and even from outside the state came in to fight the fires and help restore water service and power systems,” he said. “Those are really important relationships and connections that support the recovery process.”

He hopes that same wider community will help residents of the impacted neighborhoods as they begin the slow process of rebuilding their homes and their lives.

Other participants in the GEER study include CU Boulder professors Abbie Liel and Amy Javernick-Will of CEAE and Andrew Whelton of Purdue. Students Nicolas Berty, Jacob Klingaman and Hailey-Rae Rose of CU Boulder and Amy Metz and Dae Kun Kang of Oregon State are also aiding the effort.

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What the Marshall Fire can teach us about future climate catastrophes

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 17:17:28 +0000

What the Marshall Fire can teach us about future climate catastrophes Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 01/25/2022 - 10:17

Nearly one month after the Marshall Fire became the most destructive and one of the most unique wildfires in Colorado history, CU Boulder researchers from across campus—many of them personally affected by the fire—have pivoted and applied their expertise to the aftermath, hoping to learn from a tragedy in their own backyard and help prepare the country for the next “climate fire.”

“What makes this fire really unique is that it happened in a community that is full of researchers that study this exact topic,” said Natasha Stavros, director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder. “We are going to have measurements unlike anywhere else.”

What makes this fire really unique is that it happened in a community that is full of researchers that study this exact topic. We are going to have measurements unlike anywhere else.”
–Natasha Stavros

As a grass-fueled December wildfire in a crowded suburb, the fire was quite different than the state’s massive forest fires of 2020, resulting in many novel impacts on the environment and human health. More than a dozen research projects are already underway, investigating everything from its impact on air and water quality, to the fire speeds that drove it, and how changes in infrastructure and insurance could limit damage from future fires like it. Researchers hope the findings can help inform homeowners, local governments and communities today and shape policies for tomorrow.

“In between all of us, there is so much expertise to address the causes and the impacts of this fire,” said Joost de Gouw, CIRES fellow and professor of chemistry. “If we come together to produce and publish research, we can really change the future of how we think about wildfire.”

Recipe for a winter wildfire

Three ingredients contribute to fire on the landscape: fuel, climate and ignition, said Stavros.

Due to higher-than-normal snowpack levels in late winter of 2021, a wet spring and a rainier than normal July, grasses grew abundantly in the Front Range throughout the year. By the time December rolled around, fuel accumulation was up 60% to 70% compared with a normal year. These plentiful dry grasses, combined with a 3-foot snow deficit and fierce Chinook winds, set the perfect stage that day for a spark to spiral out of control.

Avery Hatch, a CU Boulder doctoral student in environmental engineering, monitors indoor air quality in a spared home after the Marshall wildfire. (Photo by Casey A. Cass/CU Boulder)

Environmental engineering faculty Julie Korak and Cresten Mansfeldt collect water samples. (Credit: Fernando Rosario-Ortiz)

This abundant fuel would not have existed without increases in precipitation and snowmelt in the first half of 2021, followed by a drastic lack of moisture in the second half of the year—both of which point to climate as the driving cause.

“It’s the first time in my career I have felt comfortable saying this is a climate fire,” said Stavros.

Climate change will continue to have a hand in the future of wildfire, increasing the length and intensity of fire seasons as well as changing how, when and where water is distributed, said Stavros.

In addition to analyzing the impacts of fuel growth, researchers in the Earth Lab are also examining the role of another major factor in the Marshall Fiire: speed.

The Marshall Fire only burned 6,000 acres, less than half the size of Colorado’s second most destructive fire in state history, the Black Forest Fire. Yet it tore through twice as much infrastructure, accounting for 39% of all homes lost to wildfire disasters in the state since 1999, according to Maxwell Cook, doctoral student in the Department of Geography and the Earth Lab.

The fire also now ranks in the top 15 most destructive wildfire events in the western United States, only one of two grassland fires in that list.

Cook is currently working with Jennifer Balch, director of the Earth Lab, to conduct research on the factors which make a fire most likely to burn down homes.

So far, their data shows speed matters most. This may seem obvious, but Cook, Balch and their colleagues have developed new data that now allows them to track and quantify that impact.

“The speed of the fire is also really what makes it difficult for emergency management personnel to respond, to get evacuation orders out in time,” said Cook. “Management strategies that are aimed at reducing the speed of wildfires could be critically important for communities.”

This could include creating fire/fuel breaks around suburban neighborhoods and removing vegetation next to homes—strategies already broadly in use in foothills communities around Colorado. Early detection systems and quick emergency responses are also key, especially in densely populated neighborhoods.

The Earth Lab is also involved in helping develop better maps of where homes are at risk of wildfire across the West, which can help communities and insurances companies better plan for and mitigate that risk.

“We may need to think hard about what we define as the wildland urban interface (WUI). There's a lot of flammable landscape and development out there that's maybe not accounted for,” said Cook. “Building smarter, both in terms of where we build and how we build, that's going to be a big thing moving forward.”

Clearing the air

Three weeks after the fire, homeowners and renters who did not lose their residences still face an important unknown: Is it safe to go home?

Buildings were inundated with smoke, full of unhealthy compounds created as the blaze burned paint, fried refrigerators and melted metals in nearby homes. These chemicals, absorbed by surviving structures like a sponge, now pose a previously unquantified problem.

Air quality scientists from CU Boulder, CIRES and NOAA quickly compiled an online resource about the impacts of post-fire smoke cleanup in homes. Led by de Gouw, they next installed instruments in several surviving homes to measure levels of harmful gases and understand the lingering effects of smoke on indoor air quality. Another team of scientists have also been driving through affected neighborhoods with a mobile laboratory to measure what the remains of buildings emit into the immediate atmosphere.

An interdisciplinary team including engineers, social scientists and chemists from across campus will continue to collect data indoors over the coming months to inform residents and local governments and learn more about lingering human health concerns that wildfires in urban areas can present.

Downstream effects

Meanwhile, Fernando Rosario-Ortiz and his colleagues are studying water.

For years, the associate dean for faculty advancement at the College of Engineering and his colleagues in the Environmental Engineering Program have worked to understand the implications of wildfire on water. But they usually study forests.

“Combusting homes is a whole different ball game,” said Rosario-Ortiz.

It’s not just wood that’s burning in a suburban fire: It’s homes, vehicles and all the stuff in them: fabric, plastics, electronics, batteries, you name it. Those remains and the compounds created can find their way into local water systems. When a fire is quickly followed by rain or snow, as was the case with the Marshall Fire, concerns about contamination are even higher, he said.

Julie Korak and Cresten Mansfeldt, assistant professors of environmental engineering, have partnered with colleagues across campus, local community organizations and municipalities, to collect surface water samples in the area, test for concerning chemicals and address questions of watershed safety posed by residents. In the next month or so, the team will have initial results to share with stakeholders.

“Everyone here takes their water very seriously,” said Mansfeldt. “This work provides a first fingerprint of how a fire like this impacts a community, and how we can assist recovery.”

Building back better

Now that we know a fire like this is possible, the big question the Front Range faces is: How do we keep this from happening again?

A first step in answering: To get a comprehensive, birds-eye view of the damage.

Read more

Fire resources

To that end, Brad Wham, assistant research professor in the Center for Infrastructure, Energy and Space Testing, will join a national team of colleagues this week to fly drones over the burn sites before cleanup begins, gathering valuable clues about what happened that day. The work is part of a larger collaborative research effort, supported by the Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity IRT (RISE) within the College of Engineering and Applied Science, formed in the wake of the fire to connect environmental engineers, social scientists, first responders, and policy experts conducting work on natural disasters.

And once rebuilding begins?

“It is entirely practical to build back better,” said Keith Porter, adjoint professor of civil, architecture and environmental engineering.

Porter explains that using fire resistant materials to build a home doesn’t only make it less likely to burn, but they’re a relatively cheap upgrade (less than $10,000 compared to replacing a home worth $600,000) and due to their longevity, can lead to immense savings over the life of the home.

The International Wildland Urban Interface Code, for example—adopted in parts of Boulder County—requires that fire resistant materials be used in new construction. Porter points out, however, that unless cities and counties mandate this kind of fire code, homebuilders aren’t required to swap wood shingles for a non-combustible roof or to replace vinyl siding with stucco in new developments. When rebuilding, insurance companies may mandate that a house be replaced “like for like,” potentially inhibiting homeowners from replacing flammable building materials with fire resistant ones—even if it could save insurance companies money to let people do so, according to Porter.

As affected residents navigate their insurance policies, find temporary housing in a tight market and try to stay healthy during the omicron surge, fighting for fire resistant materials may not be able to be a top priority. This is why, Porter points out, the real power to protect public safety is not on the individual, but in the hands of local officials.

“Everybody else is affected by somebody else's house burning,” said Porter. “Both in an economic sense and in a moral sense, we really are all in this together.”

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Researchers will use DOE grant to help update aging natural gas infrastructure

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 15:43:08 +0000

Researchers will use DOE grant to help update aging natural gas infrastructure Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/02/2020 - 09:43

A multi-institutional team that includes three University of Colorado Boulder civil engineering researchers has been awarded $5.4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to help enhance the performance and longevity of natural gas distribution systems.

Led by Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham, the team will use the award from the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop a new testing and modeling framework to allow the gas industry to better evaluate the products it uses to rehabilitate aging cast iron and steel natural gas pipelines.

The award is part of ARPA-E’s Rapid Encapsulation of Pipelines Avoiding Intensive Replacement (REPAIR) program. REPAIR aims to develop technologies to reduce natural gas leaks from legacy and outdated natural gas pipes by creating a suite of technologies to enable the automated construction of new pipe inside existing pipe.

“Our objective is to validate a 50-year design life for innovative pipe-in-pipe systems by developing numerical, analytical and physical testing protocols,” said Wham, who serves as managing director of the Center for Infrastructure, Energy and Space Testing (CIEST) facilities at CU Boulder.

His partners on the project will be center co-directors Mija Hubler and Shideh Dashti, as well as researchers from Cornell University, the University of Southern Queensland and the Gas Technology Institute.

Wham added that the project will focus on pinpointing when pipes are likely to fail and establishing performance criteria for replacement pipes.

“CIEST is perfectly positioned to take on this kind of critical infrastructure research,” Wham said. “We not only have the facilities and faculty expertise for large-scale structural and materials testing, but also the industry experience necessary to provide relevant, real-world recommendations that can be rapidly accepted into practice.”

Led by Assistant Research Professor Brad Wham, the team will use the award to develop a new testing and modeling framework to allow the gas industry to better evaluate the products it uses to rehabilitate aging cast iron and steel natural gas pipelines.

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