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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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December 2020 #12257 Page #116
Damage Assessment and What It Teaches Us About How to Build Stronger
By Doug Allen, P.E.
Over the past few years that I’ve worked as an engineer for Simpson Strong-Tie in Texas, work-related events have brought me to a few great beach destinations: Clearwater and Destin, Florida, to name a few. But tightly packed schedules always left me feeling like I didn’t get to enjoy the fullness of the locations I visited. So I made a short-term goal to fulfill a bucket-list item: Enjoy a beach vacation. Not long after setting that goal, I actually had an opportunity to visit the Bahamas. Unfortunately, it wasn’t for the beach vacation I imagined, but rather to survey the catastrophic destruction wrought by Hurricane Dorian. With the one-year anniversary of that hurricane on September 1 and hurricane season already hitting us hard with Hurricane Laura, I thought it would be good to revisit my observations from that trip. We are still gathering information about the extent of damage from Hurricane Laura and there will likely be field assessment teams dispatched to the hardest hit areas. That was the case in 2019 after Hurricane Dorain struck. Soon afterward, I was invited to join a field damage assessment team by my colleague Tracy Kijewski-Correa, Professor at the University of Notre Dame and Director of the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) Network. I was familiar with damage assessment and had joined this organization as a member after being involved with similar assessments following Hurricanes Harvey and Michael. When I announced I was participating on the team, the natural reaction of friends and co-workers was “you’re going to the Bahamas!” It was the same thought I briefly entertained when I accepted the invitation to go. Of course, I knew it wouldn’t all be crystal blue water, white sands, and palm trees, but the reality check started with the trip preparations. We were encouraged to get vaccinations, told to prepare for conditions without food and water provisions, advised there would be limited room for our luggage on the required chartered planes, and informed of media stories about missing people and foul stench areas causing sad speculations. As you may recall, Hurricane Dorian made landfall at Elbow Cay in the Abaco Islands on September 1, 2019, as a Category 5 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts up to 225 mph. Those were the strongest sustained wind speeds recorded for an Atlantic hurricane that had made landfall since 1935. Dorian made landfall again on Grand Bahama, where it remained for approximately 24 hours before departing as a much-weakened storm to the northeast. Continued next page
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