Good morning everyone and welcome to the 2024 Northern California Earthquake Hazards Workshop brought to you by the USGS and all of you wonderful people who come to join us and make the workshop wonderful.
To get us started today, we have no other than the Director of the Earthquake Science Center, Christine Goulet. [WooHoo]
[Laughing] Thank you, Sarah. And welcome everyone to the 21st annual Northern California Earthquake Hazard Workshop.
It's been one of my favorite events over the years for many, many years, I don't remember exactly the first time I came in and joined but it was in Menlo Park, and actually, at one of those instances was the first time that I saw "Lightning Talks" that now to be different, we call them "Thunder Talks," maybe they're more punchy, but it's very great to have you all
here, and this is the fourth edition of the virtual online workshop. So this is organized by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Earthquake Science Center.
So I'd like to take this opportunity to say just a few words and share what we're all about.
So at the Earthquake Science Center, we have the mission to collect a wide range of data on earthquakes, faults, crustal deformations, conduct research to increase our understanding of earthquake processes, reoccurrences, effects, and so on.
We synthesize this information and knowledge into a seismic hazard products, working with colleagues that can be then shared with the public and various stakeholders and that's what we do at ESC.
And we do that in a partnership within the USGS with the Geologic Hazard Science Center that's based in Golden, Colorado.
They put out a lot of those products and integrate them and are in charge of displaying a lot of the products in addition to science
products done by the two groups that are shared in journals and so on. So, this is an event from the Earthquake Science Center and I want to take this opportunity to thank our fearless leaders. [laugh]
We have an amazing organizing committee. Everybody contributed with their own skills interest and so on to make this a success.
So for three days of workshop and led by our fearless leader, Sarah Minson [laugh]. And so I think it's a good time to just give them a rounded of applause in anticipation of a successful workshop.
So, thank you everyone. So, I'm gonna stop sharing. I just want to say a few more words.
So again, this is the 21st edition of this annual workshop. This is the fourth that is fully virtual and over the years it evolved to include more topics and also to increase diversity. I think that's one of the positive outcome that came out of COVID and so on.
Now it's easier to broadcast and really be part of of this workshop as an attendee.
So we have a lot of different speakers so I thank them all for joining and I really encourage everyone all the participants to really engage the chat in this workshop is usually very vibrant with questions and so on.
We're all here to learn from each other and to engage and often this is a type of interaction that even if we do it virtually if we're really engaged and into it first, it makes it way more interesting.
There's new ideas that come out. So welcome everyone. Enjoy. There's a fantastic program that I'm sure they will go over in a few seconds and Sarah shares regularly the agenda so you can see what's coming up.
So thanks everyone and enjoy the workshop.
Woohoo! Thank you, Christine! Okay, I just have a few random bits of business to tell everyone about before we get into the good stuff.
Old business from last year. You may recall them. We recorded last year's workshop and we promised to post it.
And you might be wondering, how long does it take to get an entire workshop of talks through the USGS internal review process
and to make closed captioned and accessible for all the videos from 3 days of workshops. And the answer is
exactly a year. We just got last year's workshop posted now and I will put the links to it in the chat so that you can all have it but they are online now and thank you so much
to Susan Garcia and Scott Haefner who did so much work to make this possible. Thank you.
It was a year of a nightmare. It was their nightmare. Thank you, Susan and Scott.
Also, you might remember last year we talked about how SCEC is expanding to be statewide and what can we do to integrate
the SCEC community models with the existing community models in northern California and our action item was that we wanted to organize a workshop about community modeling in California.
And you might be wondering how long does it take to organize a completely new workshop from scratch. The answer is also exactly one year.
So, please save the date for March 4-5 where we will have that workshop that we decided to have at last year's North Cal workshop.
More information will be coming soon, but for now please just save the date for March 4-5. To talk about community modeling in California.
Okay, new business. As Christine just said, we have a wonderful set of organizers who make this workshop possible.
They are Shane Detweiler, Austin Elliott, Susan Garcia, Evan Hirakawa, Alessandra Jerolleman, Keith Knudsen, Josie Nevitt, Grace Parker, David Schwartz as well as Scott Haefner
as our webmaster and John Grindle as our host. So thank you
everyone, you make this possible!
And then lastly, I just want to say to all of you. Welcome! Thank you so much for coming.
You are the people who make this workshop wonderful. And we welcome you just as you are. Please come
however, you need to come. Come with your children. Come with your pets. Come with your compatriots, comrades, whoever you want.
We welcome everyone. Just please be kind to each other and have fun. The fun is mandatory. And then my very, very, very last note is you may have noticed that at the top of the agenda, I called this the "Too many earthquake anniversary edition of the workshop."
Usually when we organize a workshop, we have a bunch of sessions on science that is just interesting to us.
Any new earthquakes that have happened. And we look back and we ask, are there any important earthquake anniversary that we should mark.
And when we did that this year we realize it turns out that every major earthquake in California happens in either a year ending in 4 or ending in 9.
So this was the even 10th or even something 5th anniversary of so many earthquakes including but not limited to this is the 60th anniversary of the 1964 M9.2 Alaska earthquake whose tsunami was so devastating to northern California.
And the 1969 Santa Rosa earthquake; the 1984, M6.2 Morgan Hill earthquake; and the 1989 M6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1994, M6.7 Northridge earthquake and the
1991 M7.1 Hector Mine; 2004 M6.0 Parkfield earthquake; and the 2014 M6.0 South Napa earthquake and the 2019
M7.1 and M6.4 Northridge, I mean sorry Ridgecrest earthquakes, so yeah too many earthquake anniversaries so instead of trying to have a session on each of these earthquakes, even though they are awesome and deserved to be remember and look back on
we're going to ask ourselves what are the important science questions that came out of these earthquakes.
So for example, if you look at Parkfield and South Napa, a lot of the hazard came
from the afterslip. And so we did a session on afterslip and what does that mean both when we look around the world and what do we learn from earthquakes around the world?
How does that relate to hazards in California? So that's kind of the theme of a lot of our sessions this year because too many earthquake anniversaries and so finally, what is the format of this workshop?
How does the workshop work or not work? With the exception of the "Thunder Talks," all of our talks are pre-recorded.
We have chat open during the talks. Please use them. The great thing about being able to chat during the talk is that it's open to all questions great and small.
There's no point of clarification too small. There's no question too large rambling and philosophical.
Just go in there and ask whatever you want to ask. And the speakers will be in the chat with you to answer your questions.
If there is information you want to share, or a url to something, go ahead and do that. The chat is available to you to share information.
Some speakers put commentary on their own talks during the talks. It's whatever you want. The chat is there, please get in there and have a good time.
The only thing we ask is that it's good when a talk ends to put a PIN in your conversation about that talk and then come back to it at the Q&A at the end of the session and there will be Q&A at the end of the session.
If people start talking about the first talk during the second talk and then they're talking about the fourth and the second talk during the third talk
they're like, there's a lot of conversations that get into the leaves. So we just recommend that go crazy, talk about whatever you want,
but when a talk ends say, okay, let's come back to this at the Q&A at the end and start talking about the next talk.
It keeps things a little bit cleaner in the chat. But basically, go crazy have fun there.
And then at the end, we'll come back and we'll do a Q&A with all the speakers.
You can go on camera, we can share things, whatever you want. And if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say, oh, go in the chat or will be on camera or whatever.
Don't worry because we are going to have a little tutorial on Zoom next. And to do that, I'd like to introduce you to all host with the most,
John Grindle! [WooHoo]
Thank you, Sarah. Okay. So you've invented a new game. Who can list the most earthquakes in 30 seconds?
And you are the champion of that game so far. We'll go through this really quickly just so that we're all on the same page.
Sarah already mentioned most of this. The USGS strives provide a diverse, inclusive and respectful environment because it is essential to the integrity of our organization and our science.
If anything fails to exemplify these ideals, please alert and organizer for immediate assistance. We're going to go through really quickly some of the ground rules that Sarah already mentioned.
Mute yourself unless you're asked to unmute and obviously if you want to ask a question we can do that during the Q&A.
Chat is for questions and be nice. Raise your hand down in the bottom on your control bar you can actually raise your hands using the reactions if you want to
ask a question for the Q&A. We definitely encourage you to ask verbal questions for the Q&A.
It definitely works a lot better. We have our organizers that Sarah already mentioned. Thank you to Shane, Austin, Susan, Evan, Alessandra, Keith, Sarah, Josie, Grace, and David.
And finally, if you have any issues today, you can chat me if your audio is not working or video or you're having issues and my name in chat is NCEHW Help and my name is actually John.
If you have real big problems you can email Shane and hopefully he'll be able to help you out.
And I think that's all we're gonna do for our quick little review. And Sarah, we can jump right in to our first topic.
Excellent. Thank you so much, John. Well, our first topic is ethical earthquake investigation and to bring us on this journey, this ethical journey of ethical investigating we have the wonderful Sue Hough and the wonderful Maggie Ortiz-Milan, please welcome our first moderators.
Okay, hopefully I'm unmuted.
You're great.
I'm great. Well, so yeah, first, major shout out to Sarah and her compatriots for pulling all this together. To start things off they've put together hopefully a really thought-provoking slate of talks about ethical aspects of mostly field investigations either internationally or domestically working with local populations.
If it seems tangential, if you're at all involved with the field investigations, it really is something critical considerations
and things to think about. So to get started, the first speaker is Rachel Adams and then we're going to be followed by a 30-minute discussion where we can get back together to ask questions and talk.
So, Rachel's talk is "Resources for Ethical Earthquake."
I'm sorry, I'm not quite awake apparently, "Resources for Ethical Earthquake Research."
Hello everyone, my name is Rachel Adams and I'm a research associate at the Natural Hazard Center at the CONVERGE facility at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Today, I will be presenting on resources for Ethical Earthquake Research.
To start, I wanted to provide a brief definition of ethics and hazards in disaster research. Ethics broadly
refers to a set of principles, norms, and standards that guide the conduct of reconnaissance and longer term research.
And as researchers working in disaster context, we hold the special responsibility to ensure that our actions are guided by an underlying set of ethical principles that protect the dignity, rights, and welfare people.
In recognition of the importance of ethics in our field, CONVERGE a National Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure or NHERI facility
is dedicated to advancing the ethical conduct and scientific rigor of hazards and disaster research. As part of this initiative
we offer a number of free resources to help train a diverse next generation of the interdisciplinary hazards and disaster workforce.
Among the resources we provide are the CONVERGE Training modules. These free online trainings are grounded in cutting edge research from the social sciences, public health, engineering and other disciplines.
Each module features a set of learning objectives, lesson plans, case studies, a list of additional resources,
and it's worth one contact hour of general management training through the International Association of Emergency Managers.
Since the first training module on social vulnerability and disasters was released in July, 2019,
we have released a total of 12 modules. To date, we have over 9,000 registrants and over 10,000 module completions.
We currently have 6 trading modules that focus on the foundational topics of institutional review board procedures and extreme events research conducting emotionally challenging research, cultural competence,
collecting and sharing perishable data, and social vulnerability and disasters. We also offer six modules on more specialized topics of broader ethical considerations,
positionality, reciprocity, gender-based violence and field work, public health implications of disaster research and
indigenous sovereignty and disasters. Each of these topics touch on the core themes presented in the graphic at the center of this slide;
including the important topic of research ethics.
While research ethics is discussed in all of the training modules is particularly relevant to the content of these 7 modules which I'll present on today.
Whatever training modules focuses on collecting and sharing perishable data, which we define as highly transient data that may degrade in quality be irrevocably altered or be permanently lost if not collected soon after it is generated.
Perishable data includes ephemeral information that exists before, during, or after a disaster, that, if gathered, can characterize preexisting hazardous conditions near miss for actual disaster events,
and longer term recovery processes. This data may need to be collected at multiple points in time across varying geographic scales to accurately characterize exposure, susceptibility to harm, and coping capacity.
Collecting perishable data requires thoughtful attention to our ethical principles and collective responsibilities as researchers.
In the context of parable data collection has very unique ethical challenges for hazards and disaster researchers.
These challenges arise due to the time pressure to rapidly collect data before it is lost. Outside researchers traveling to disaster affected areas with unfamiliar cultural contexts or
there's often discrepancies between researcher and community power and resources. The emotional challenges experienced by researchers due to exposure to widespread damage, destruction, loss of life, as well as the disproportionate impacts among marginalized popular populations and newly vulnerable people.
And the complications evolved in coordinating research teams in order to balance the need to collect perishable data while not interfering with emergency response efforts.
As well as the fact that locally affected colleagues may be disaster survivors or disaster first responders.
Another training module we offer, focuses on institutional review boards. The committees responsible for reviewing the methods of proposed research involving human subjects.
IRBs ensure the protection of human subjects and their right as participants of potentially harmful research. The IRB outlines three main principles for ethical research.
Respect for persons or that participants must be treated as autonomous and be able to make informed decisions.
Beneficence or ensuring that research maximizes the benefits to participants and that they are protected from harm.
And justice, or that researchers must emphasize fair, equitable, and appropriate treatment of all participants.
Working with an IRB for hazards and disaster research also comes with a set of challenges. When collecting hazards in disaster data, there can be IRB challenges associated with administrative delays, particularly when the IRB meets on set schedules that may not align with your research timelines,
gathering letters of support during a time of crisis, which can be difficult to obtain and varying IRB standards across different regions and organizations.
These factors can make it difficult to quickly collect perishable data in the aftermath of an earthquake or other disaster.
There are also a number of broader ethical considerations for hazards and disaster research that fall outside the purview of the IRB.
IRB is mostly focused on the initial stage of research. Once a study is initially approved, IRBs only require researchers to outline any deviations from the original protocol and support any adverse events.
They do not typically require investigators to report on the myriad ethical challenges and dilemmas that may arise over the longer term.
As we cover in another training module, some of these broader ethical challenges include issues with gaining informed consent in disaster context.
Individuals who have just been exposed to a disaster may be particularly vulnerable to experiencing negative psychological impacts from a study, especially if you experience a highly traumatic event such as the loss of their home or a loved one.
This may alter the decision making abilities. There's also the issue of dealing with participant burden due to the heightened risk and psychological and emotional discomfort from recounting traumatic events among those affected by disaster.
The influx of researchers after a large scale disaster can also place an immense burden on participants who may be approached by several researchers seeking the same information.
There are also issues with maintaining participant confidentiality and privacy. Due to the fact that disaster affected areas are inherently unstable, and researchers may find it difficult to ensure that participant records and data are kept safe and secure while in the field, especially in areas with pronounced conflict and violence.
Compensating participants for their time may also be challenging due to the fact that they may have just experienced extreme loss and thus may be more prone to coercion for and with compensation.
There is also the potential for interpersonal team based and organizational ethical dilemmas, such as harassment or discrimination in the field, issues and conflicts within research teams, and even in congruence between the ethics of the researcher and partner organizations, all of which pose a number of ethical challenges and considerations to those involved.
Finally, traveling to a disaster affected area often means an influx of researchers working in international and cross-cultural settings.
As mentioned, this can increase participant burden as well as exploitation of local communities. Due to these issues, several countries had even enacted restrictions from foreign researchers wishing to enter the country and study the affected population following a disaster.
These as well as other ethical considerations are all discussed in detail in the broader ethical considerations for hazards and disasters research training module.
In terms of resources to enhance ethical earthquake research, several of the modules focus on building important skills such as cultural competence.
Cultural competence involves learning and being sensitive to the cultural context of the research site to insert that the research design and methods are not unintentionally causing harm.
Ethical research should be driven by the needs of local populations. And working with local partners can enhance cultural competence by bridging cross-cultural boundaries such as language, enhancing research capacity and feasibility, and empowering members of the disaster affected community.
The reciprocity training module focuses on engaging in reciprocity and research, which involves the ongoing practice of reflection, relationship building, and exchange between researchers and the people and places they study.
Researchers are ethically obligated to work to produce mutual benefits for the people involved with or affected by hazards and disaster research process.
While the unique context of each study will determine how to engage in reciprocal relationships. Some examples of reciprocity include compensation, training, cultural preservation, and sharing research findings with study participants and members of the affected community.
We also have a module that focuses on social vulnerability or the factors that make certain populations more susceptible to the negative impact of hazards and disasters.
These factors include age, income, race and ethnicity, disability, pre-existing health conditions,
English proficiency, immigration status, among many others. Additional ethical considerations are needed when working with these at-risk populations,
who are vulnerable to coercion and undue influence. It's also very important that research focuses on these populations so that findings can inform more inclusive disaster risk reduction in the future.
So the last training module I wanted to highlight focuses on conducting emotionally challenging research. Disasters wreak havoc on communities and can make research in these settings emotionally challenging.
Some examples of the consequences of emotional challenges that can arise include vicarious trauma, compassion, fatigue, and burnout.
This module describes how recognizing researchers emotions can lead to more ethical and methodologically sound research practices
and provides a number of strategies to help cope with emotionally challenging research, including journaling, counseling, and peer or institutional support.
Given the magnitude of ethical challenges and dilemmas that can occur in hazards and disaster research, and a fact that there is often not one right or wrong answer in every situation, we recommend that each researcher have an ethical toolkit to help guide them in what they ought to do in light of what they know or have experienced.
In a journal article by Brown and Peek entitled "Beyond the IRB, an ethical toolkit for long-term disaster research."
They offer an ethical toolkit that highlights core principles that one can use when making decisions about research.
These principles include beneficence or maximizing benefits of research participation; fidelity or maintaining fidelity to an implicit or explicit promise;
reparation or making amends for previous wrongful acts; gratitude or expressing gratitude for participation in research;
justice or treating participants fairly and equitably. Non-maleficence or minimizing harms and participation in research and self-improvement, improving one's conditions in respect of virtue
or of intelligence.
In addition to the training modules, CONVERGE also offers a number of other related resources. We have developed annotated
bibliographies based on the literature used to develop each of the training modules. You can download these annotated bibliographies directly from the CONVERGE site.
We also have an assignment bank which includes assignments developed by course instructors who have used our training modules in their classrooms.
If you are an instructor, we encourage you to use one of these model assignments as well. If you have a new assignment, you would like to share with us for our assignment bank, please do let us know.
We also have a list of additional resources associated with each module that are accompanied by links. And finally, the last resource I'd like to highlight is the extreme events check sheets series.
Which is made up of free one- to two-page graphical check sheets, designs for students and others new to the field
and they offer best practices and are meant to be used as researchers design their study, prepare to enter the fields, conduct field research, and exit the field.
Thank you so much for joining me for my presentation. If you have any additional questions, you can reach me at Rachel.Adams-1
@Colorado.edu
Great. Thank you so much, Rachel. And we did have one question in the chat, which Rachel was able to respond to.
So as a reminder, if you have questions for the speaker, as Sarah said, please feel free to jump in
the chat and get a conversation going in advance of the discussion. To do proper introductions, which I sort of skipped, my co-moderator for the session is Maggie Ortiz-Milan who you'll hear from in just a few minutes. The first speaker,
Rachel is from CU Boulder Natural Hazard Center. Our next speaker is Leila Darwish
from the Disaster Resilience Risk Reduction; I'm sorry, a Disaster Resilience Risk Reduction Specialist
from the city of Vancouver.
Good morning. My name is Leila Darwish and I will be presenting today on considerations for equitable earthquake recovery and community collaboration.
I work in emergency management. I've worked for the city of Vancouver as well as the BC provincial government and the city of New Orleans.
And so I'm just going to be sharing some thoughts around equitable recovery and the importance of working with nonprofits and community organizations to ensure more equitable outcomes.
And before we can talk about equitable recovery, I think it's important to acknowledge that in disasters we have people in our communities who are disproportionately impacted who experience greater injustice,
more lack of access and more barriers when it comes to receiving timely response. The ability to prepare being in positions of increased risk going into the disaster and then also experiencing barriers and blocks and difficulties accessing
aid and financial support in the aftermath of a major disaster.
So, you know, folks like seniors, people with disabilities, people with chronic health conditions are all going to be more impacted in the event of a major earthquake, and also be more impacted by things like
poor housing after lack of access to financial aid,
medical support everything our lower income residents are just disproportionately impacted when we have major disasters.
They don't always have the same amount of cushion and time to wait for slower financial aid and kind of benefits and insurance to come through on the back end and then also a lot of our lower income residents tend to be living, at least where I currently reside in Vancouver, Canada.
A lot of our lower income residents are living in older apartment buildings, for example, that do not have seismic upgrades the same way that maybe wealthier residents who are in the newer buildings that have been updated.
They have a higher degree of safety than just by being low income, you might end up in a building that is not as safe and that is more prone to having an adverse outcome.
A lot of our seniors, people with disabilities, you know folks with mental health issues also end up being lower income.
So there's this kind of confluence of different identities that are really compounded and made more at risk in a disaster.
Renters are more at risk in terms of poor outcomes in recovery. You know, BIPOC residents and communities face, you know, systemic discrimination, racism, and violence, pre-disaster, during and post that also results in barriers to access and to equitable recovery and migrant workers in the undocumented community face a whole host of challenges in terms of safety
and violence and inability to be eligible for key recovery funding and programs. So that's not an exhaustive list, but again, when thinking about recovery considerations and equity in the aftermath of an earthquake, really thinking through who in your community is at a disadvantage going in
and is going to need more support and more advocacy to really have services and support that work for them and that are easy to access.
Now just a few considerations, I'm not going to explain all of these just because I'm short on time,
but when I think about post-earthquake recovery, especially in a major event where we've had, you know, huge damage to our infrastructure, our lifelines, and damage to our housing
I foresee kind of a situation where we're going to have a lot of our residents displaced into host and receiving communities and a recovery that is going to last many, many years.
And so folks might not be able to come back for a while and with that comes a whole host of issues.
Both kind of in the local community of impact and then also in the receiving and host communities. You know, strain on health care systems, and people need to access health care and not being able to both in the local community because of impacts to the medical infrastructure but also in the communities that they might end up in temporarily they will be facing already because of the pandemic and what we've been dealing with the last 4 years, our health systems are strained and there's a
lack of staffing. And so if you have a large influx of people that come into a community, there's going to be more pressure on that system.
And again, the people who need that system the most, our seniors, our folks with chronic health conditions, people with disabilities are going to really feel that acutely.
And it's gonna make a big difference in terms of their well-being. Housing is huge, in any post-disaster, landscape.
It is something that we have not figured out in disaster response and recovery. The ability to have housing in the aftermath of it disaster is so critical in terms of people being able to stabilize being able to root again having some sense of safety.
Children actually recovering better because they have that safety and in the current system that we live in, the current situation, we are in a housing crisis both in terms of scarcity and affordability,
and a lot of folks, for example, I think about in the city I live in, there are people who are, you know, currently living in places where they can barely afford it
and the only reason why they can afford it, they've been there for so long and the moment that's destroyed and they have to kind of look again in the rental market, they're not going to be able to find something they can afford and that's going to cause huge concerns, especially at a time where people might have lost their jobs because of the destruction and businesses closing or you know they work in a city that is currently down
and you know there's a huge interruption of income, people are going to need support with housing and when we don't have adequate post-disaster housing, when we have a scarcity and an affordability issue that's going to pose a lot of issues, especially for our most impacted people who might already be dealing with
income restrictions or with discrimination in terms of racism and classism and ableism. Another thing I want to name in any post-disaster situation and especially I would think for our West Coast
cities and communities is this concept of post-disaster gentrification. So we already have to deal with gentrification already all the time and it's made a huge impact in our communities in terms of affordability and pushing people out and if we were to have a major disaster that takes out a lot of housing, the potential for there to be a rebuild where heavy gentrification happens is highly likely and you know developers and
real estate interests could push very strongly for that and if they have the right allies in government what could happen is a rebuild and a recovery that actually excludes a lot of people from being able to come back
to their home community. So there's a huge need to put certain checks and balances in to really having the right people at the table to advocate for the needs of our disproportionately impacted residents to make sure that they have affordable housing to come back to in a community that welcomes them because that is a huge thing to watch out for and I think something that certain interest are going to be very opportunistic about and there's going to need to
be a lot of push back. Another thing to think about is when we have a lot of residents displaced and spread out in different communities, they're not going to be able to as easily have visibility on the recovery process as well as kind of advocate and put
pressure on their elected representatives. And so if they're not in that community and they're separated, are they receiving information about what's happening.
Are they receiving information on current planning and the opportunity to have input and to kind of push back if something's happening that is inequitable.
That's difficult when you're not in your home community. And so there needs to be efforts made to really engage people in, engage evacuees where they are at, and make sure their voices are heard.
You know, that can be as easy as kind of having online Town Halls and ways to kind of engage people from afar having committees that the government is listening to that have certain representatives from, you know, folks with lived experience to nonprofit that are led by or serving disproportionately impacted populations.
All of that should be part of the recovery planning process and the post-earthquake process. And again, if you have the right kind of government, they'll do that.
If you have the wrong kind of government, they're gonna redesign a city in their image and it will be an image of privilege of power and it'll enshrine a lack of access and make certain injustices stronger in the aftermath instead of using the recovery as an ability to create more equity.
A few other things, you know, in major disasters, we have lots of contamination with earthquakes, the potentials for fires, for spills.
Especially if it's a port city and there's refineries and other things in the mix.
And we really got to make sure that whatever debris removal, whatever, cleanup happens in a way that we don't end up with future environmental justice issues and toxic legacies being born by disproportionately impacted communities by BIPOC communities and low-income communities.
So need to keep eyes on that. Also, you know, really looking at, you know, is there damage to culturally significant sites, contamination of local food systems, where I live in Vancouver, we're on the unseated Coast-Stailish territories of the Suquamish and Slaywood Two First Nations.
You know, their communities and the Indigenous lands where they gather food and medicine and they kind of carry out their life and their traditions if that is damaged by contamination, by spills, by you know, other parts of the earthquake
there's going to be impacts to culture and people's well-being. And so people need to think about, you know, how to try to minimize that or kind of help with the healing or kind of manage that in the aftermath in terms of quicker clean up and and addressing those concerns.
Finally, trauma, mental health, really making sure that is being looked at and provided resources for, especially in the midterm and the long-term recovery, we have a pretty good focus of that in short-term recovery, but as the years drag on the attention kind of can wane.
Really looking at what access and barriers there are to financial aid and any kind of recovery programs. And finding ways to cut down that red tape, cut down those challenges and really to provide our disproportionately impacted populations with additional support and being able to apply and being able to have people walk them through the process or just make that as easy as possible.
And then ensuring that again when it comes to funding and resources and programming, not just looking at short-term recovery, but really kind of planning for the midterm and the long-term phases of recovery that this isn't going to be done a major earthquake is not going to be recovered in a couple years,
it can be decades, right? It can be longer than that and really making sure that there's still consciousness and awareness and resources available to people, you know, in the years to come, especially, you know, some of our folks who face the greatest barriers to recovery are going to still be needing support in the years to come because they haven't been able to access properly what they needed early on.
And finally I'll say when we have people displaced and ending up in lots of kind of farther communities.
You know, what services and supports are available for them there? How do we work with, you know, host communities and receiving communities to make sure that the needs of the people are being addressed and support the nonprofits in those communities
to actually be responsive have the funding they need to actually support evacuees. It needs to be thought into that because if they don't end up in another major city that has a lot of resources, you know, they're gonna need some additional supports in smaller towns and communities.
And it's important to kind of put some pre-thinking into that. Now in my work in emergency management, the part I've loved the most has been working with non-profits and community organizations, both in the information that I am able to receive in terms of feedback and being kind of told when our programs are failing and when we need to do better
when it comes to equity, and also the ability to kind of really have those folks raise points of, you know, this is what people need,
this is the folks who are being really impacted right now. It makes a huge difference as someone in government in order to kind of figure out how do we move our resources around who do we need to prioritize when it comes to recovery.
And I really recommend for folks if you don't already have this in your community, the importance of getting to know your non-profits and your local community organizations to have conversations about, you know, who can stand up and respond in a post-earthquake situation?
What would they need to do so? Who has resilient buildings? Who has generators? Who has continuity of operations plans?
Who wants to actually be part of the planning? You know, can you find a way to pull together all the different service providers and community organizations?
Faith partners in your community and actually exercise and do a tabletop exercise with, you know, an earthquake scenario so that they understand what you're going to do as government or as kind of, you know,
whatever organization you're in and you also have a good idea of kind of what they can offer and how you best can complement each other and collaborate.
Some people call these VOADs, which stands for Voluntary Organizations Active and Disaster. You can call it a Recovery Committee, call whatever you like.
And usually when I pull these together, I work with local non-profits and community organizations first and foremost, but I also engage regional nonprofits, national non-profits, and international.
Because if you are dealing with, I mean, if it's like a small flood, that's one thing.
But if you're dealing with a major earthquake, a major impact to, you know, your community, your city, your town,
you're gonna need more than local non-profits because the local non-profits though they have the best relationships and the understand the culture and they are going to have the most information on, you know, who needs the supports, and who's most impacted.
They are gonna be impacted themselves in the disaster if it's a major earthquake where powers out, supply chains are impacted, you know, buildings are down, they're going to have trouble getting their staff to work, they're going to be dealing with their own damage and need to kind of figure that out.
So they might be a bit slower to respond and they might also not have access to their regular supply chains.
Whereas regional and national and international organizations will be able to come in with more resources because they're not going to be in that initial zone of damage.
However, the national international organizations don't necessarily understand the culture, don't know who needs the services.
So the more they've interacted with local non-profits in advance of this kind of event or they've engaged with someone in government who can educate them on that, the better their actual aid is going to be when they arrive, they will show up;
they'll bring all the toys and lots of human power and that's great! The regional non-profits and the local non-profits
what's important with them is they're gonna be there for the midterm and the long-term recovery because that's their community, that's their area, whereas our national and our international organizations often show up really well in early recovery, but they don't quite stick around for the whole cycle because we live in a world of constant disaster and chaos, they have to go other places.
And so it's really important to consider when you're working with all these different groups: (A) what people's capabilities are; (B) who really works well together and how to connect, you know, the locals to the regionals to the nationals and get them kind of working together in a good way so that they're informing each other and utilizing each other's resources.
But also where are they all going to show up on that recovery spectrum from short- to long-term and whose needs are they going to be able to meet
in that time. So really important to think big, engage everybody. Don't just limit yourself to traditional disaster organizations.
You will be doing your people a huge disservice if you do. And really think broadly about, you know, service providers, advocacy organizations, you know, all the different potentials that can provide a huge range of services and also who are from the kind of the communities who have lived experience, they will be the best advocates and the best at actually providing services
in the aftermath. So, finally I'll just share, you know, when we're thinking about different organizations to include in both our kind of pre-disaster recovery planning as well as our post kind of recovery operations.
Again, there's a huge list and I mentioned some of this already, you know, you want to be working with your traditional disaster response recovery organizations, you want to be reaching out to them in advance and having conversations about earthquakes and how you could potentially utilize them, you know, maybe some of them really want to be a part of different sheltering operations or, you know, at your points of distribution or they can help in a certain
way and you can kind of really find kind of make that stronger kind of going into the event so that you know you know what to expect let say if your government, but then in addition to that you want to have all the other organizations that you can possibly get in your local community who are able to provide services and who are able to provide support.
And the more that they are kind of led by, you know, disproportionately impacted populations or in service of that, the better you were gonna understand kind of equitable recovery and and what needs to happen in that.
So having folks like disability advocacy organizations and service providers at the table, migrant justice organizations, having senior's organizations and Indigenous led or Indigenous serving organizations, cultural organizations, different faith groups, both the disaster faith organizations but also the faith
community in your town, you know, whether it's like, you know, churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, having that represented and at the table is critical.
Different technology and communications groups that can set up solar, Internet, childcare organizations that can provide free childcare to evacuees,
critical so that parents have a bit of respite and can kind of go ahead and apply for housing and look at you know doing the whole benefits and all that.
Legal assistance organizations are so necessary in terms of helping people in need actually navigate these really cumbersome legal processes and benefits
and kind of disputes and denials with FEMA, as well as tenant and landlord issues.
Food justice and food security and feeding organizations are worth their weight in gold in terms of making sure that people are fed.
The list goes on, right? Animal groups. Having philanthropy at the table is really important to making sure that a lot of your local organizations, the ones who have been working with this proportionally impacted populations beforehand and are going to continue to do that through recovery are going to need more money to do it because more people are going to be impacted;
they're going to have to expand the services that they offer and the level of care that they're providing.
And those groups, the smaller groups in your community aren't getting up in front of the media necessarily and getting all the money like some of our traditional disaster organizations.
So you need philanthropy to actually see who's doing the work, who's in the trenches, and making sure that they're being funded so that they can actually do the midterm and the long-term work.
All of that is really important. So if you have the opportunity to pull these groups together, you know, both in terms of providing recovery services, but also making sure that these organizations are engaged in whatever recovery planning and kind of conversations around build back better that are happening to ensure that build back better is actually built back equitably and justly that will do a lot when it comes to really supporting people and making sure that a recovery is more
just. Then just kinda, you know, leaving it up to government. Now just a summary, thank you for listening.
And again, important to plan both pre- and post- for disaster recovery to identify and consider who is this disproportionately impacted in your populations to really put thought into, you know, what could happen in a recovery in terms of ways that people could be, cut out of it, and ways that they could deal with, you know, different barriers and scarcities and if there's any way to kind of
find a way to soften that and decrease that impact to put some effort into that thinking before the disaster and to try to figure out who to engage on that front. And then again, there is so much strength in engaging nonprofits and community organizations and really thinking through local, regional, national and international organizations and how you're going to be able to call them and bring them in when you're dealing with a major event.
And the more you pre-plan that, the more you engage ahead of time, the more you're going to be able to utilize that in the aftermath of a major earthquake and it will benefit your people immensely.
Thank you so much and I look forward to the conversation.
Thank you very much, Leila, for that presentation. Next, we're going to hear from Eduardo Miranda, who's at Stanford University,
and I've had the great pleasure of working with Eduardo for several years now as he's our current EERI Learning from Earthquakes Program Co-Chair.
Eduardo, will be talking about "Post-earthquake Reconnaissance in Developing Countries."
Good morning, everyone. My name is Eduardo Miranda, and I'll be talking about post-earthquake reconnaissance in developing countries.
First of all, I would like to acknowledge the organizing committee whose names you see here for the kind invitation to participate in this workshop in particular in this interesting session.
First question I would like to post is why reconnaissance in developing countries? And the main reason is because developing countries are the ones who typically experience the largest impact after earthquakes, typically much larger than the one that is suffered in developing countries.
And to illustrate this here and listing a number of earthquakes listed chronologically with some of the estimated economic losses.
And if you now sort this same earthquake, but as a function of a loss as a percentage of their GDP what you find is that typically developing countries are the ones who are suffering the largest losses.
And in particular, when those percentages become very large relative to their GDP, the impact is long lasting for many decades and some would even
argue that will never recover and return to how it was before the seismic event. As you know, and you've seen in the program, the topic for this
years workshop is "Too many earthquakes anniversary edition," and, I've been to many earthquakes and done a lot of reconnaissance in developing countries over the years.
And, I've chosen only three and I'll just describe and show you a few images from these three.
And, why this earthquake reconnaissance is so important. It's basically because of this quote from Jorge Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, who
became a faculty member at Harvard and who said "that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
A little bit of background about Haiti, as you know, it's the the poorest country in the Americas and the earthquake hit
in their capital, a very large metropolitan area with a large population of about 9 million people.
We did our reconnaissance, careful planning, flying into the Dominican Republic, renting a couple of cars and bringing everything, all our food, all our water, all our fuel, such that we didn't need it to depend on anything from Haiti and one of the key aspects was to secure locations where we could stay safely
during the week that we spend over there. We face very challenging conditions. Here I'm just illustrating
in the summer I returned to do some laser scanning on structures and temperatures were extremely hot and I knew that people would not believe me,
so I asked Professor Moslam [?spelling] to take this photo of me while holding this thermometer that was reading 132o
Fahrenheit and it was so hot that even our laptops were shutting down and we were not understanding what was happening
and I promised that I would not complain about hot temperatures, and since then I've kept my promise of not complaining about hot temperatures;
unfortunately, I've never experienced such large temperatures. In addition to documenting good and bad performance, something that is very important in
these trips is it's important to document construction practice and this is even more important in developing countries. Here I'm just illustrating some examples of how poor construction practices were in Haiti and they continue to be.
In particular, here some details of the framework or how they were doing it, and I was just scared of taking these photos.
Forget about getting underneath or climbing on top of this framework, let alone being underneath while thousands of pounds of concrete are being poured on top of that, but it's a reflection of
you know, some of the reasons of why this happened by far it is the largest disaster that I've witness.
And as you know, approximately 200,000 people we're killed in that earthquake, a similar number that China experienced in the 1976 Tangshan
earthquake. Some examples of our documentation of emergency response and living conditions, documenting of seismic performance of critical facilities that as you know even their Presidential Palace collapsed.
Here the collapse of a Palace of Justice, the collapse of the Ministry of Justice and Finance, collapse or
a big impact on 1,300 educational facilities that either collapsed or were completely unusable. And same thing for 50 hospitals for healthcare centers
that either collapsed or were unusable. Another interesting thing about, post-earthquake reconnaissance is that it keeps you humble and you learn about things that really challenge the state of the art.
And for example, if you talk to a practice engineer, they would tell you that, of course, non-ductile concrete is really bad and in particular because the rotation capacity of the ends of beams and columns is really bad and they would probably not be able to sustain rotation
demands of 3%. Yet I found this structure with this residual deformation of 7% that suggests that peak
drift ratios were in the order of 8% that it would have never imagined that would be able to be
resisted by non-ductile concrete structures like those in Port-au-Prince. Moving on, this is
a month and a half later I traveled with a group of students to Chile where they experienced a mega thrust, 8.8 magnitude earthquake.
Even getting to Chile was very challenging because their airport experienced major non-structural damages illustrated in this image and it's probably one of the poster examples of how simply avoiding collapse or severe structural damage is not enough as this was completely
unusable and it completely shut down for a number of days and we were not able to fly in, not until a week after the earthquake.
Eighty percent of the air traffic in the country was completely shut down because of this airport and another airport in Concepción that experienced massive non-structural damage.
Other interesting things that we saw over there and documented was for example this excellent performance of a seismically isolated
wharf on a port in Puerto Coronel, but we also documented massive lateral spreading that created all sorts of nightmares in the port.
But not everything is more challenging in developing countries, and sometimes, you find that you have much better access to facilities,
and that you're given permission to take photos or in this case we were able to get hold of this video, that documented the failure, the counter weights on a elevator
and we were able to actually see what actually happens in these elevators during earthquakes and, fortunately it was empty, but you just saw the collapse of the kind of weights
onto the cabin. Finally, here an example, a few images from Ecuador. That in 2016 experienced again a reverse subduction earthquake of magnitude 7.8 and we're able to fly there about 36
hours after the earthquake and just want to show you again a good example of the kind of things that, are important to document.
This is a public hospital in the city of Manta. This is the pediatric floor, which was the second floor and as we're moving up I'll show you some other images, but as you see this I want that you imagine what the patients, the nurses, the doctors and the parents that we're inside of this hospital experienced
here. Showing you what was the main quarter for the emergency exit that was completely blocked. And yet coming back to this, lessons that you learn in this post-earthquake reconnaissance.
This was the top floor, and it looked like I'm showing you over here and to this date they don't fully understand why it experienced such a good performance even when one would expect the largest
peak acceleration demands to occur in the top floor. There are other things that are always good and it's the same in developing
countries, for example, the importance of good cameras in particular good lenses. Here are a few images.
I'm an amateur photographer. And some examples of what good cameras and good lenses can do for you in the mountains.
But it's the same thing when you're doing, post-earthquake reconnaissance.
Here just illustrating the importance of good telephoto lenses. That they are basically able to reach and observe and document performance that otherwise you would not be able to document and not able to understand
the reasons behind the failure in this case, very interestingly, one could assume that there were problems in beam column joints, yet the beam column joints had excellent detail
and the problem was somewhere else. Or this pounding in this new high-rise buildings in the city of Manta.
Again, with good cameras, good lenses. We're able to document the pounding and the consequences of such pounding.
Or this coupling girders in this reinforced concrete building in the city of Bahía de Caraquez, on the coast.
And just to illustrate the importance of documenting the failures, but somehow we not always learn from them.
The image on the left was taken by my advisor, Professor Bertero in the Good Friday Earthquake in Anchorage in 1964 and the one on the right I took in 2016.
And it really begs the question, how come I was able to take a photo 52 years later
for the same type of failure? It's clear that we don't learn enough or the amount of learning that we should be doing to not repeat this as Jorge Santayana
famously told us in his quote. Finally some images from Puerto Rico.
Where we documented the performance of many structures. And with that some concluding remarks. Post- earthquake reconnaissance
has been for many years and continues to be the most important tool to learn from earthquakes and it translates into great benefits for society and here just examples of the benefit and these are some residents
that allowed me to take this image after talking to them. Standing in front of, what used to be their building in Mexico City in 2017.
Or some, final images from Haiti. And with this, I thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you, Eduardo for sharing all of your experiences. Next we're going to hear from Lindsey Davis from the USGS
who's going to talk about ethical earthquake investigation and international humanitarian assistance perspective.
Hello everyone, my name is Lindsey Davis and I'm a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
And today I'm going to talk a little bit about ethical earthquake investigation from an international humanitarian perspective.
In my position, I sit within the U.S. Agency for International Developments Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Hazards Program, so I'm just going to give a quick overview of both of those.
I serve as a liaison between the two. So, BHA or the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance is the U.S. Government Lead Coordinator for International Humanitarian Assistance
and millions of people around the world are provided with life-saving aid through that mechanism. It was created in 2020 and some of you may have heard of the Offices of Food for Peace or the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance these two offices have been combined into the Bureau of Foreign Disaster Assistance.
These two offices have been combined into the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. And it's the only U.S.A. bureau that provides humanitarian aid and sets the foundation for longer term recovery.
BHA's mandate is to save lives alleviate human suffering and reduce the impact of humanitarian crisis and so this mandate guides the program in globally that USAID implements
related to humanitarian assistance.
USAID responds when there's evidence of significant unmet humanitarian needs. When the U.S. humanitarian assistance will save lives, reduce suffering, and mitigate the impact of emergencies.
The affected country requests or will accept U.S. government assistance, so by invitation always and responding alliance with U.S.
Government interests and humanitarian objectives.
BHA has multiple response options. They can provide immediate assistance of a $100,000 to foreign countries They can fund non-governmental organizations and international organizations including the UN, the United Nations.
They can deploy a regional advisor assessment team or a disaster assistance response team which is a team that deploys on the ground to the impacted country or region.
They can activate a response management team or an RMT that sits in the Washington D.C. area to support the on the ground response.
They can dispatch commodities, they have centers
located in multiple location around the world where they can provide supplies of very quick basis and they can request support from other U.S. governments agencies
such as the U.S. Geological Survey. And so all of these with stars have implications for the scientific community
and the USGS and other agencies with scientific expertise can provide assistance in these categories.
USAID and USGS have partnered related to international earthquake response and capacity building for many decades and in 2009 they established a formal team jointly to do this even better and so EDAT strives to assist foreign partners upon their request with seismic hazard identification and monitoring and help them to take the lead in mitigating and responding to seismic and other hazards in their respective
countries. This is a great opportunity for U.S. scientists because USGS folks who go abroad are able to get a sense of the diversity a lot of context and situations that they could potentially encounter domestically, especially for hazards that don't occur very frequently.
And then also it allows us to draw in expertise from different parts of the Earthquake Hazards Program and Landslide Hazards Program within the USGS depending on the needs of our colleagues.
When there's not an active earthquake response ongoing, the earthquake disaster assistance team engages in capacity building activities and those typically include training, technical assistance, education and outreach or scientific exchange often related to these topics listed on the right.
Although certainly not limited to those topics if we get a specific request from our counterparts, we try to meet that.
When we think about earthquake response here are some of the types of information that USGS can provide in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake and then longer term whether it stays weeks or months
and we can provide this information internationally as well to the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and to local colleagues if it might support their response efforts.
In addition, USGS has several post earthquake activities that can be implemented following a major domestic earthquake.
And just to note that these can be brought to bare internationally as well.
The National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program gives four agencies within the U.S. government the mandate to collaborate on both domestic and international post-earthquake investigation and to capture those lessons so that they can be applied here in the U.S.
So to bring this back full circle to the Earthquake Disaster Assistance Team, EDAT, sits within both the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and within the Earthquake Hazards Program and so we really try to find the sweet spot within those two mandates that allows us to execute and learn from both capacity building activities and response activities.
So, related to international earthquake investigation, there are a lot of ethical questions in dichotomies that have arisen for me and for some of my colleagues related to these
mechanisms for collaboration and work abroad. And so I just wanted to share some of these and plant these seeds.
So as we go through the rest of the presentation, everybody can be thinking about what you might do in a similar situation and what questions you might have.
So the themes we identified were safety, cultural competency, coordination in relationships, information and data sharing and the authority to do so,
limited resources, capacity, and applications and relevance of information. So I just want to quickly highlight two earthquake responses that the Earthquake and Landslide Disaster Assistance Team have participated in
the recent past. The first of those is the Haiti, 2021 NEEP earthquake response.
And so this was interesting in part because we responded virtually. So no EDAT or LDAT scientists actually physically deployed to Haiti, unlike in the Haiti, 2010 earthquake.
And there were of course some reconnaissance teams that did go out, but we supported the response virtually.
We were able to leverage long-standing partners partnerships for this response, including one with GeoHazards International (GHI).
We've had several long-standing projects where GHI and USGS have collaborated through the Earthquake Disaster Assistance Team,
and so we were able to produce information, in both English and Creole that was released by USGS on the USGS website and via social media and then GHI has local staff based in Haiti and they were able to share this information and protective actions that were similar to the guidance that Civil Protection was releasing on the radio in local languages from Onsavo as well.
And so just highlighting as well that there were a lot of landslides as part of this response and so the USGS Landslide Hazards Program and the Landslide Disaster Assistance Team were able to do a lot of satellite
imagery, analysis that was then corroborated when we were able to set up an over-flight with some of the resources that BHA and our colleagues responding on behalf of the U.S. government had.
So we had a Haitian colleague taken over flight. You could see one of the photos that he took here on the bottom left and I just wanted to mention this because there's there's a lot that really goes into some of these relationship building opportunities and I think
situations like Haiti where we've had long-standing projects that came out of a disaster response give us some real opportunities to think about.
That earthquake and landslide Disaster Assistance Teams also participated in the Turkey Syria earthquake response
through characterization of the extent of faulted areas; documentation of earthquake trivial landslides;
assessing performance of structures built over the last two decades. Sharing knowledge of best practices for structural health monitoring;
training in-country partners on operational earthquake forecasting; and production of aftershock forecasts; extending seismometer coverage to inform land use building codes and hazard identification
and then USGS also supported work on interpretation and modeling of recorded ground motions.
We had team members participating in trainings for local emergency management colleagues in working with graduate students and in-country counterparts on various types of earthquake investigation,
including assessing fault displacement as you see here.
We had colleagues that specialized in earthquakes and landslides, work with international counterparts to assess persistent hazards related to things like deep sea landslides, debris flows,
population centers that were still at risk, the potential for landslide dams that could impact communities if a breach were to occur, etc.
We had structural engineers and civil engineers from the Earthquake Disaster Assistance Team participate in reconnaissance efforts to investigate the performance of buildings and especially looking for lessons to bring home in terms of what worked.
So here are some examples of working with in-country colleagues on those topics.
So bringing this back around to ethical earthquake investigation, I think the concept of ethical dilemmas by Brown in Peek, 2014, is a really important concept that it will form a lot of our discussions.
So Brown and Peek defined this as situations that raise moral or ethical concerns where there is no obvious clear-cut resolution.
And they also note that it's the responsibility of researchers to monitor their own research ethics. That means in order to solve ethical dilemmas, it's a case-by-case basis.
And so geoscientists need to be equipped with the ability to both identify and work through these ethical dilemmas in the field.
Some additional thoughts that I think can help inform our discussion today. Include questions that I have and I think about ethical earthquake investigation.
One of those revolves around information or data sharing and reciprocity. So when and how should we share information and wonder what circumstances might we need to be a little bit intentional or careful about data and information sharing.
So for example when we're working with local colleagues, you know, what institutions or agencies are already providing information in this context and how do we make sure not to undermine the authority of local researchers, emergency managers, etc.
How do we research, make sure research reaches beyond the scientific community and can be applied? How do we share results with communities, especially those that are contributing to research efforts?
How do we give back? Make sure that we're contributing to society at multiple skills.
Some additional questions related to coordination. How do we do the best possible job at coordinating and avoiding duplication of effort, especially in international earthquake investigation where there are more actors and the ecosystem is so diverse.
Cultural competency and language. How do we make sure scientists have the tools to demonstrate cultural competency and respect for impacted populations?
What role does language play in coordination, information sharing, collaboration? What is our responsibility as geoscientists to ensure we're engaging and sharing data and information with colleagues in communities that might not speak English.
Relationships and engaging with local researchers during a major earthquake response, local researchers are often experiencing the disaster themselves.
May have lost friends, family, colleagues, may have damage to their property that they're trying to deal with.
They're simultaneously likely trying to collect scientific data and they're being asked to host local and non-local scientists depending on the context.
They may be approached by multiple groups of international and or non-local domestic scientists. And how do we ethically engage and coordinate with them?
Who do we engage with and why? Who leads on scientific outputs that emerge from responses? These questions on this page came up a lot during the Turkey earthquake response.
And we were fortunate to have quite a few USGS researchers with pre-established relationships with
either Turkish-born or local Turkish colleagues and we do have Dr. Mehmet Celebi who is an engineer with the USGS who is Turkish-American who was able to do a preliminary reconnaissance mission to lay the foundation for us
for future reconnaissance efforts.
When we think about limited supplies and resources, how do we balance sending geoscientists into a disaster zone to gather perishable data with the likelihood of them needing to rely on local supplies
and resources. What about the possibility of hampering response efforts or lifesaving efforts by interfering with things like search and rescue, etc.
When is the right time for geoscientists to engage in a reconnaissance mission? How soon after the humanitarian response starts or how soon after urban search and rescue efforts end should we really be trying to engage?
In terms of prioritizing resources for response. How do we prioritize funding and other resources for earthquake investigation?
Able to rebalance pre-event versus post-event resources. Should short-term humanitarian applications, for example, identifying persistent or imminent threats to a population, take precedence over longer-term research
that could lead to saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the future. Should investigation that's more broadly applicable be funded or prioritized over sites-specific data collection? For example, investigation that might benefit one particular community but that wouldn't have broader, more transferable implications.
Are there any situations under which it would be ethical to prioritize U.S. interests over the needs of the host country?
Or is that really something that we need to constantly make sure to honor the needs of our local colleagues.
Safety is another one that I think quite a bit about, especially recently in the context of the Turkey reconnaissance missions.
When over 100,000 buildings collapse and the access to resources is limited. How do we protect geoscientists from both physical and psychological safety risks?
What can we provide to them to minimize the danger and give them the most support possible. How can we use major earthquakes as teachable moments, but also make sure that scientists are safe in these situations?
You know, we can bring students and early career scientists into these amazing teachable situations, but we want to make sure that we have the resources to support them appropriately.
How do we balance the risk of loss of data versus the risk of loss of life or injury or serious illness in the field
where there may be limited access to resources.
A few next steps to think about during our discussion. Empower the geoscience community to anticipate and evaluate ethical dilemmas and earthquake investigation.
All of these situations are going to be different consistently, and so giving people the tools they need to think about ethics in individual context is extremely important.
Their ethical toolkits and frameworks for social science, public health, and humanitarian crisis related practice and research.
Should there be an ethical toolkit for geohazards disaster research? I would encourage everyone to take the CONVERGE training on broader ethical considerations for hazards and disaster researchers.
If you haven't already taken it, Please do and if you have taken it would be wonderful if you share that with a colleague or take other CONVERGE trainings as well.
Thank you all for your time and attention today. I look forward to discussing this further and I appreciate the organizers and the participants in this important discussion.
Please feel free to email me if you'd like to follow up on anything I mentioned today.
Thank you very much, Lindsey, and we do have some questions coming in the chat.
And Lindsey also gave us many, many other questions to consider that we can bring into the discussion. For our final speaker, we'll have Lilia Yumagulova.
She's from Preparing Our Home and the University of Saskatchewan and she'll be speaking on cultural safety and ethical space in earthquake preparedness planning and Indigenous communities.
Hello everyone. My name is Lilia Yumagulova. I'm joining you today from the Squamish Territory
on the land now known as North Shore Metro Vancouver, Canada. This is actually in front of us, the Squamish Canoe.
This is a project that we did with the Squamish Ocean new family. And I just wanted to acknowledge the beautiful space of cultural safety and finding that safe space from which we can do good work.
So today I'll be talking about a couple of things. It's mostly based on my work that I've done through Preparing Our Home,
which is an Indigenous youth led program that I'm helping out on the background of it. The youth are front and center.
And I'm also banting postdoctoral fellow at University of Saskatchewan at the Indigenous Studies Department where I'm leading a project on relocation planning in Indigenous communities.
I myself come from Bashkir people of the Ural Mountains and in Canada I am an immigrant and settler.
I wanted to start with a note on terminology. Some of the key terms we'll use today.
Some of you may have heard a term cultural safety, I think a cultural competence is used in U.S. more and they are very different.
So what cultural safety does really well, that's different, it acknowledges the power imbalances that we have.
Whether it's an emergency management and engineering or any other plan in any other domain. And it is really an outcome.
So it's based on respectful engagement that addresses power at the core. The other concept, sorry, phone ringing.
The other concept is that of the ethical space. And the words that I'm using, I should specify actually throughout the presentation the words, the concepts, the stories that I'm using are primarily developed by Indigenous communities or Indigenous academics, researchers and so on so forth.
So this one is from Willie Ermine who is a Indigenous academic in law and he's drawing on Roger Poole's work looking at the ethical space
and what can we do to create this ethical space? So it's when two societies with disparate worldviews
are poised to engage with each other. It is a thought about diverse societies and the space in between them
that contributes to the development of a framework for dialogue between human communities. So let's think about that.
Those kind of spaces in between that we can develop for respectful engagement and dialogue. The other one is from Elder Marshall out of Unama'ki
it is called "two-eyed seeing." So this, refers to learning when you see from the eye, one eye with the strength of Indigenous ways of knowing and the other eye with the Western ways of knowing,
and when we can use both of those eyes together. The other important point that I wanted to make is that we often use terminology, traditional knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, Chief Atleo he was the Grand Chief a while back in Canada and he said, "Lily, use the words Indigenous science."
Put it on the same, on the same leveling field as the Western science and so on. Alright.
The other term, sorry, lots of words to begin with is cultural humility. Many of you maybe have heard about this term, maybe not.
So what is cultural humility? It's really allowing yourself to be comfortable with the discomfort that you feel when you're learning about new things like Indigenous cultures or other cultures.
So it is a process of self-reflection. Really inward, oriented process.
Where you acknowledge yourself as a learner you're really kind of trying to achieve the foundation of the culturally safe environment and acknowledging that you will make mistakes.
The other thing is that in from perspective of cultural humility, you're looking at the perspective of the people that you're working with or trying to see the world from their perspective and critically addressing the biases that you hold.
And what's exciting in British Columbia within the medical field there is actually now British Columbia cultural safety and humility standards developed with health standards organizations and First Nations health authority.
It has a lot of the terminology, best practices, how to move about this field. And of course it's important that these concepts they interact but the big important thing when we think about cultural safety is that safety is not determined by us, the practitioners in the field or people providing care, it is determined for those experiencing that disaster.
So it's determined, for example, the evacuees perspective or community's perspective. And it will always consider the broader social, political, and historical context.
So if you're dealing in evacuations, it would consider the forced relocations of Indigenous communities.
It really requires self-reflection. It's based on the foundations of anti-racism, cultural humility and trauma and violence, cultural humility, and trauma and violence in important care.
And this is a cultural humility and trauma and violence informed care. And this is from Public Health Agency of Canada.
You can look it up and find out more information and actually throughout the presentation this is just the high-level snippets that I'm sharing.
Hopefully encouraging you to look up more. All right, so Preparing Our Home, it's a program dear to my heart.
So it's a program based on Indigenous science. We do a lot of land-based learning across different communities.
We had over 100 communities participants from over 100 communities participate. Across Canada and we had some beautiful mentors from across Turtle Island, so U.S. as well.
We do a lot of community mapping. I'll show some examples. At the core, it's really intergenerational program.
Focuses on capacity building, technical training, whether it's oil spill, wildfires, earthquakes,
and at the core is peer mentorship and youth leadership. So these are some examples from the activities that we did
around the communities that communities have led. So, hazard and acid mapping, some of the familiar words.
Food preparation and food security personal family and community preparedness. So we have a significant disproportionate gap
when it comes to public safety and Indigenous communities,
in Canada.
Some of the data that when the federal government looked at it a while ago looking at 30 years of data, they found out that Indigenous community, First Nations communities living on reserve
are 33 times more likely to be evacuated due to wildfire, 18 times due to any hazards, floods or anything else.
And we also know that fire fatalities on reserves are 10 times higher than the Canadian average. So fire is really important piece of it.
As is food. As you can see, there is some meat smoking, fish preparation, wall skill training, and historical mapping and so on.
So this is an amazing example, just some examples of what some of the Preparing Our Home communities have done.
This is Mattagami First Nation out in Ontario as you can see there was an exceptional kind of wholesome mapping process.
They used the GIS data, they used elder stories and walk on the land, the medicine, youth hunt, and all that was brought together in kind of Indigenous value mapping space that they can use for many purposes at the Nation.
This is work of the Lil'wat Nation in BC, so fantastic work on youth curriculum. As you can see, we see some of the basic things we would see anywhere in terms of personal preparedness but it really has to extend in the space of family preparedness, community preparedness,
first aid, firefighting but also her herbology and food preservation, traditional medicine, elder stories,
and so on and so forth. So great work by Casey Gabriel and Sandy Henry and this I should say gives credit to Devon Navi who was a counselor with the nation and our program graduate.
Okay, so, one important thing, this is a community that has done great work in planning for tsunamis as you can see here all layers of data have been used.
There is a hand drawn map. There is a tsunami evacuation zone. And there is some drone footage that we took with some youth on the day, but really important piece that happened in this is a couple of new challenge communities, so there they have memories of earthquakes as disasters and what happened in their communities with that.
But there are also many stories that situate earthquake as a natural phenomena that occurs, right?
So it's really embedded in the stories. So, bringing that intergenerational knowledge is really important.
And this is Melody Charlie sharing some she's an incredible visual artist sharing some of the stories with the youth at the school as part of the workshop.
So I'm just going to highlight some resources in BC that are pretty cool. So this was developed by Museum of Anthropology, working with Indigenous leaders.
And it tells different stories of why to be prepared. So kind of brings it through art and Indigenous storytelling, really bringing and activating that Indigenous knowledge piece.
There is also out of that kind of full acknowledgement that oral histories as intergenerational evidence for understanding of historical earthquakes is really important.
And there is a full on kind of teacher resource around that, Indigenous knowledge and earthquakes that I recommend you check out.
There is a link there at the bottom. So it speaks about the history, oral history and earthquakes, cultural significance, and it has some activities attached to it.
There is also a lot of media coverage these days, so this is a story that was first ran in the Hawkeye magazine and it really looked at some of the research that happened in the Pacific Northwest and this is an amazing finding that is looking at the historical data.
After the big earthquakes, the sites were reoccupied. So we tend to rebuild and go back because there are many other benefits like the fish, food access, and so on and so forth,
transportation. I will also share some great work that Maori colleagues are doing down in New Zealand.
It's really exciting, my supervisor, Simon Lambert, he is a New Zealand leader in the space of Maori leader in this space of disastrous production.
So this story, you can look it up at University of Auckland, it shares the kind of the ancient building techniques and how they withstood the earthquakes.
That's one of them. If we look, why the Maori experience is so important because it's recent, right?
The earthquake happened, fairly recently and we kind of have a good narrative of what we can learn from Indigenous response recovery and
planning. So one thing that came out following the Canterbury earthquake that there was a strong traditional basis in the response.
It was immediate, spontaneous, and it was really guided by Maori values throughout the response.
So this is something that we will unpack a bit more. Through the great work of 2 other Maori academics and Dr.
Kenny and Dr. Fibs. They looked closer at the recovery that followed and some of the things that they found are really echoed for other disasters as well.
So the communities experience disproportionate impact in part because of that kind of pre-existing vulnerabilities, but also access to resources, sanitation, transport, support from first responders.
There was a strong value-based recovery. And there are some beautiful Maori words here that share these key values.
Enacting community, you need familiar networks, social relationships, extending support, respect support hospitality,
insuring protection and activating community support centers. This is one thing we learned through Preparing Our Home with all the diverse languages, Indigenous languages that are spoken and also endangered across Canada.
There are amazing words that really talk about preparedness in the languages and they bring a different layer of meaning to this work.
So I strongly encourage to engage with that dimension as well. And of course there was always room for improvement.
As we find especially in terms of integration, respectful integration of Maori knowledge and strategies and values within the response.
This is really beautiful work. By, an amazing scholar, Maori scholar, and it really speaks to the ethics, which is the focus of this session.
So how would we go about ethical engagement? So here are some pointers. Respect people allow them to find their own space.
So that really brings us back. To cultural safety, to meet on their own terms. Meet people face to face, so important.
It's so hard to work on Zoom. You can do it once you've met people. We've done it throughout pandemic really effectively as a program, but you really need that to build trust, to feel each other, right?
To kind of I understand what that person wants from me. And hosting is really important. Food is really important.
Being generous in general is really important. But also culturally safe and be reflective of the outsider status, right?
So the fact that, you know, very little about the communities that we engage with and be really open and curious about that.
So these are some of the things and don't want flaunt your knowledge, you know that you have a PhD or something, it's often quite irrelevant in this context.
Instead of wanting it, it's beautiful to find ways of trying to share it.
And I would like to wrap up with this kind of slide. This is incredible work by one of the youth.
A "Queen of the Sea" Allaura Langford, from Curve Lake First Nation.
As long as Allaura was alive, her community at the time, I think she was 18, her community was on the Boiled Water Advisory and this is a beautiful piece that she did about water.
But what I want to talk about here is voice, that we often talk that we need to give Indigenous communities voice in earthquake planning or we need to go in emergency management generally in engineering but it has to go a little bit beyond the voice and I wanted to read
a quote from a recent paper. This is primarily was written by John Scott, a global leader in International Indigenous Disaster Risk Reduction.
He's of Clint Heritage and here is what this book says. So disaster resilient solutions must be developed by listening to and critically engaging with the affected people.
However, it must go past that by building capacity to lead and co-govern. Decision-making at the community national and international levels will only address the needs of the vulnerable communities to the extent that Indigenous leaders and experts
in law, engineering, public health and medicine, environmental science, education, transportation, public policy, are present at the table to shape public policy.
Across all dimensions that affect their lives, governance, economic development, energy, infrastructure, building codes, and standards that will impact their communities.
And as a final slide, I wanted to invite you, we're working on something really exciting right now.
So an Indigenous Matriarch led course on disaster resilience. So this is really bringing in lived experience, Indigenous art, storytelling in a beautiful way together.
So some amazing people. Rose White here from the Navajo Nation; she was their emergency manager and she's doing amazing work across many communities now.
Sherry License, one of the first female fire chief at Adams Lake. We have water innovators, first female chiefs in their treaty territories, Michele Vandaward, the first female president of the Aboriginal Firefighter Association of Canada.
I really hope you can join us for this course as we develop it and I will find ways to share that with you.
So thank you everyone and we'll be looking forward to your questions.
Yeah.
So I will turn this over to Maggie. So we have about 20 min for Q&A
And there was a great discussion in the chat. But maybe, instead of trying to go back to the chat, if people wanna raise their hands
and then be called on to get the discussion going.
Yeah. Thank you to all our speakers. I think they all give us lots to think about when we're considering our earthquake investigations and making plans to study earthquakes.
Maybe while people are thinking of their questions, we can start off with a question for all the panelists, both, Leila and Lily
mentioned the importance of engaging and listening to just proportionally impacted communities and so I just would be interested to hear thoughts from all the speakers on how post-earthquake investigations can be conducted and how data can be collected and shared so that that data can contribute to an equitable response in recovery from earthquakes.
I can't see all the speakers, but maybe. Leila, if you have any thoughts to start off.
Yes, sorry, hold on, I was just getting unmuted. I don't tend to do research as much as I do actual like response and recovery in terms of providing services and supports.
So I don't know what quite to add to that, but I think for me the biggest piece there is if you are collecting research.
You need to be doing it in a way that is actually supporting people and providing them something because they're in crisis.
So, you know, to just kind of come in and try to be getting data and asking questions and engaging people in ways that might be having them relive
things and re-traumatized them in certain ways. I think it's important for people to to get that information and also for people to have in terms of directly impacted people the opportunity to share
directly what their needs are and what their experiences are. But I think they're also needs to be ways that people's needs are being met in that process and their actual needs;
whether it's prevent like gift cards or things like that. Like people have needs in disaster and how do we find a way to actually support them while they're giving us their time and their experience and their real pain and struggle.
Yeah, thank you, Leila. Any of the other speakers have any thoughts?
Yeah, I was hoping to add to that.
If I need to be pinned here. You got me. Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you all to the speakers. It's been really wonderful. So I know I was the first presentation and I was highlighting a number of the resources that we offer through the Converged facility, including the training modules.
And on the broader, in the broader ethical considerations for hazards in disaster researchers training module, which Lindsay also highlighted in her presentation, we talk about a lot of the ways that we can really make sure that the work is impactful.
You know, ways to just think about before you know, go to collect data right away, thinking about engaging local partners who are already there, you know, you don't necessarily need more bodies on the ground if there's our locally affected researchers and responders, community members.
People who can, you know, facilitate data collection who are also members of the community themselves.
That's one example that we touch on. We talk about, you know, using participatory approaches as well.
So, you know, allowing, you know, it's one thing if you're going and connecting engineering research, but from a social science perspective, if you want to hear from the people, you know, considering those specific methods that you're using, like sometimes survey methods can be a little bit impersonal, whereas if you're doing, for instance, more like a participatory approach where participants are actually kind
of defining the research questions and the outputs of the research. It could be a little bit more sensitive to actually what their needs are.
So making sure to put them first. Sorry about that. And then in terms of, you know, sharing data and findings, it's really important to make sure that the the fruits of our labor as researchers is actually going back to the communities.
You know that we're not just coming in taking the data and then you know submitting the findings to an academic journal.
Where it's far away from the people on the ground who actually made benefit from the findings and so making sure if there are policy implications that the findings get in the hands of those policymakers and other key stakeholders.
So again, these are just, you know, some of the themes that are touched upon in that training module.
So if you want to learn a little bit more, I will put the link in the chat for how you can access them.
Thank you.
If I can add a little bit. I'm an engineer and I don't do a lot of social science, but in engineering, we talk a lot about hardware and software, and we often forget about the third element, which is the humanware.
And very important, you know, you can't really do anything without it. So in all the reconnaissance that I've been involved, I've been engaged and benefit greatly from the local engineers.
Without them, I would have not been able to do my reconnaissance. And sometimes they are examples in which we, you know, I didn't have any contact in the country.
One example is Haiti, but what I did was to reach out to my friends in the Dominican Republic and they were key in the success of that reconnaissance.
And actually, it was really those early reconnaissance that enable, you know, further teams to go and document and do interesting research in that earthquake.
If I might jump in as well, in terms of I think it's really important the moment you step in into other people's lives and want something from them to really acknowledge all the privileges that you come from, that you came from a safe place,
that you have a safe place to go back to, that your belly will be full, that you will sleep in a shelter that has everything you need.
So I think acknowledging critically, acknowledging the privilege, and also then really being aware about the questions you are askingr. Often when researchers go into communities especially my training is also in engineering, my first degree was in engineering, so, this is the stuff I want to know, right, but it's really important to ask people what is important to you, you know in the life that you're living right now. ,
So I think the questions that we ask are also really critical.
I completely agree with that, Lily, and maybe I could just add, I really liked what several of the speakers mentioned about participant burden.
It's something that I've observed a lot in our international work as well. And so, you know, people who are coming in internationally, I've spoken with our counterparts and they're like, yeah, it's taking me a minute to get back to you because they're, you know, 5 to 10 other groups from
7 other countries who are also coming in and they want to do all this research and they want to set up these monitoring stations and do this and this and this, and you know we're trying to help them but I think true collaboration as has been highlighted by several of the speakers really needs to involve building our research questions and design and field work agendas together as a team.
And I know Eduardo mentioned this in the chat as well, but bringing that all the way to fruition to publishing together, you know, it's not necessarily
that all of the partners in a particular research endeavor are going to have the same skill set
and so recognizing that contributions can look like having local knowledge and context and you know whether that's cultural or geological bringing that information in when you're thinking about what it looks like to recognize people's contributions from a scientific perspective and then also actually doing research that benefits the local communities that are hosting folks.
Whether that's domestic or international.
Great, thank you all for those thoughts. Sue, did you want to?
Yeah, I have so many thoughts. I'm trying to formulate sensible questions. This has been a great discussion.
The talks were wonderful and there were some real recurring themes, whether it's working with Indigenous populations in one's own country are working internationally.
It's, you know, I think a lot about the issue of reciprocity, which a number of the talks
really touched on and what does that really mean for partnerships to be reciprocal.
You know, I think it's a really difficult question and for risk reduction to be sustainable
you need local capacities, not international experts breezing-in and breezing-out. So what does it really mean?
Not just to publish with an international colleague, but make sure that you're fundamentally focused on bringing that community along.
You know, it's not about the knowledge. It's not about the hazard map. It's not about the building codes. It's having the local professionals who can be part of that process.
And so I, you know, I know Lindsay best, maybe I can put her on the spot and we've heard some great ideas.
I just wondered if she had more thoughts.
Yeah, I do. I mean, I think I just saw maybe Rufus put in the chat about gratitude.
I think gratitude is a great place to start. But when you're actually thinking about bringing reciprocity full circle.
I think that needs to be a longer term engagement. And so this is something that I spoke with, Dr.
Jennifer Santos Hernandez about she's based in Puerto Rico and she has a paper coming out soon I believe on ethics of research.
And so I would encourage folks to keep an eye out for that. But one of the things she was telling me is that it just is so important to make sure that in working with local folks who are hosting local researchers and field researchers in particular that are hosting people who may not be from that context
you know, anything that we can do to make sure that we're supporting their ability to carry forward all of these initiatives in their own community over time is essential.
They're the ones that are going to be there if a hazard map comes out in 5 years and that needs to be implemented in, you know, the local context and emergency plans.
They're the ones that are going to be there to help the community members process what data is becoming available.
Things like that where you can really kind of take some of these lessons learned and make sure that the local folks who are going to be the representatives of the scientific community in their own particular context or empowered to bring that forward from the medium and long-term perspective.
Same as we heard, from my line in terms of emergency management. I think those same things captured in the scientific context are really important.
I see Lori Dangler has turned her camera on. Does that mean you have a question?
No.
I have a comment. From having spent much time in post-tsunami field surveys that the one of the most important things you can do is "listen."
Just really, "listen." After the fourth or the fifth time, I found if I just sort of stood there,
people would actually come to me and start telling me their stories and respectful listening turned out to be.
Perhaps the most useful field skill that I had.
I really like Lily's point about, you know, we come in with her own ideas about what's important and what needs to be done and but you know, but we're working with partners.
What's, I mean, it's listening not just to an individual who experienced an event, but communities that have their own interests.
And I really love that part of the talk to understand what their needs are. Sounds great.
Very much agreed.
So I'm trying to keep an eye on the, see if there's any hands up. And people could always unmute and jump in also.
Okay.
Steve, you want to jump in with your question?
Yes, I'm just trying to unmute here. There we go. Okay, can you hear me?
Having some remote difficult to anyone my cameras on, so I was really struck by Lilia's presentation about Indigenous communities and especially the Myra example about the imports of cultural connections and having established a common history within these various groups that established, you know, a lot of recovery immediately in the aftermath of an earthquake is local because everyone will be hammered and I see a lot that can be
learned by response in non Indigenous communities as well from this. And I know a lot of efforts been put into developing community resources and I remember after Loma Prieta, how important that was.
But more importantly in other communities. So I guess it's a general question. What can we learn about?
From Indigenous communities, in addition to being sensitive and not culturally arrogant when disasters hit those communities, what can we learn about those resources and shared common history that would help all of us after a disaster.
Thank you for that beautiful question. I think one really important thing that always strikes me when working with communities is the language used.
The language we tend to use in disaster recovery is very transactional, technical, even the word "speed" can feel kind of oppressive sometimes, right?
Are we talking about "speed" here necessarily, right? Or the quality of recovery. So I think it's also fast-paced.
So just slowing down and really listening and kind of respecting the values that are coming through. So in the Maori response and I really recommend that you look up the incredible researchers that I highlighted.
One of the core concepts that the kind of the organization that formed in the aftermath when all these different groups came together was extend love to all people.
Right, meaning we're not just going to focus on Maori people. We are literally going to look after everybody.
So I think that is an incredible very counter narrative kind of, sometimes to, you know, like how we would run recovery, right?
Like prioritizing the middle class, property owning, insured citizens or something like that, right? So I think it's that so the language used.
In another community it was a recovery after the flood and 10 years later some people are still not in their homes they're still in temporary housing and things like that.
So, looking really intersectionally who recovers and who just absolutely doesn't. So some babies were born in hotels that never got to see their traditional lands, right?
They were displaced for years following the event. And also acknowledging that some people will not recover, a number of communities that we're working with right now, it's in wildfire situation.
But their land was basically in cars, incinerator, right? Like there you can just, you cannot recover once the land is gone.
The traditional continuity is broken in terms of berries, animals left, water left, right?
So acknowledging that some communities like what does a recovery really mean to them or does it even mean anything to them?
One amazing leader Brian Fayant, he's a MIT leader out of Fort McMurray,
they had a massive event, 80,000 people were evacuated out of the city. It was quite something in northern Alberta in the kind of oil capital of Canada and he's like just using our words in planning you know like it's not necessarily evacuation or you know like response it's running for our lives.
That's all we could think of is running for our lives. So those are just some of the things that come to mind.
Thank you for that beautiful question.
Yeah, thank you for the answer. Could you also put a link in the chat to someone that work from the Maori
research you mentioned that would be helpful.
Absolutely, I will do that. Thank you.
Okay, thank you.
So there's a question in the chat from Simone Yeager. How do we ensure that credit is given to the Indigenous communities aka of intellectual integrity when working with and learning from Indigenous communities.
Actually, that's a very important question that Alessandra asked me to talk about and I forgot. She asked me to talk about Indigenous data sovereignty.
And there are actually standards for engineers who love standards. There are standards around data ownership access and protocols.
So in Canada we have OCAP, you can take a course and it describes what does that look like, right, like; what their acknowledgement look like, who controls the data, where is it stored, so really technical kind of a bunch of information to acknowledge that.
So thank you so much, Simone for that question. That is an important question that I forgot to mention.
Thank you.
So, Allen, we're just about out of time. This has been a great conversation. Oh, and
with great presentations. Alan Husker had asked in the chat mentioned data sharing.
And that's another, it's another tricky issue in general. With, you know, again, working with the international community and, you know, we see open data sharing is a good thing for the benefit of science, but
is it really benefiting local research communities who may be left in the dust. So We have about 2 min left.
I just thought I would toss out one more. Tricky issue.
I could just chime in on that briefly and say I don't think there's a clear cut answer, but I think what I would advocate for in terms of several of the themes we've covered today is just for scientists to be really intentional
about some of these questions when they're engaging with partners. Because I think, you know, going back to this ethical dilemma concept, I don't think that they're is a way for us to answer questions like that outside of the context in which they arise.
And so really being thoughtful and training ourselves to think through some of these ethical questions when we're on the ground, when we're working with communities, when we're working with partners, I think is the best way to make sure that we're honoring
humanity in the right way and really moving forward in a direction that's ethical and sound in terms of morality.
Okay, I totally love that as a note to end on because there are so many difficult issues and the whole world of international donor agencies.
Unintended consequences are just, you know they're everywhere. Things that we don't think about, what are we doing?
And who is it really benefiting? And so, yeah, to have this conversation and to be thinking about these things and in that different way, I think is great.
And so we're probably down to about 30 seconds. So maybe we can.
Susan, if I may say a last thought. As we are starting to engage people to ask them about their personal impact.
I started in Earthquake engineering after the 1985 earthquake and pretty much was finishing my undergraduate.
And I was basically assigned by my professors at NAM basically to be sort of like a tour guide and I had the opportunity to guide more than 200 people from all over the world showing them my city.
Hmm.
And out of those 200 that I guided, I only remember two asking me if I was personally
affected by this and I learned that lesson. And every time that I start and initiate those contacts, I asked them about, you know, were you friends, family, your house, your community, how it's impacted.
And I've learned that this makes a huge, huge difference. And I pass this on to recent people that went to Turkey and sure enough I mean people that helped us they had family members that had been killed,
close friends, houses destroyed. People that essentially in seconds lost their house, their car, their friends, their community.
And this is something that we sometimes take for granted. These are partners, scientists, engineers that are going to help us.
And we don't even stop to think that they be personally affected by earthquakes.
Yeah, it's an excellent point. And that was true in spades in Haiti, where everybody who was there.
You know, was was tremendously impacted.
I see Sarah itching to jump back in, we are at 11:31 a.m.
I am not itching. This has been an amazing session. Thank you so much to everyone of our amazing speakers.
Huge round of applause.
And thank you to our wonderful moderators too. This has been wonderful and has given us so much to chew over and I invite you all to chew over it while you chew on your lunch, which is what we have next on the agenda.
So in theory, we are reconvening for the workshop at 12:30 p.m.
Pacific time.
However, if you are a speaker in our
first round of Thunder Talks, these come 15 min early at 12:15 p.m. so that we can get you set up and answer any of your questions and be ready to go.
Promptly at 12:30 p.m.
So, this means you, Grace, Arben, Michael, Domniki, Irene, Albert, Evan, Mike, Kenneth, Emrah, John, Max, and Zahraa.
You know who you all come at 12:15 p.m.
Everyone else? See you at 12:30 p.m. Bye
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