NSEMO: Rapid Assessment Programme

On February 13, Christian and Vickramjit visited the client, Dorit Mason, at the North Shore Emergency Management Office located in North Vancouver.

Dorit presented an overview of the NSEMO and the goals associated with the organization. It was explained that the NSEMO was a joint commission of three municipalities within the lower mainland: the City of North Vancouver, the District of North Vancouver, and the District of West Vancouver. The NSEMO office acts as The NSEMO organization is unique in the lower mainland, such that it allows participating municipalities to act on behalf of each other to certain a certain extent when concerning emergency events.

Source: North Shore Emergency Management Office

http://www.nsemo.org

We were debriefed regarding a variety of topics including:

• Staff training programs
• Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) training
• EOC information traffic
• Communication with the public (formation of a public consulation document)
• Website/Information updates
• Public Education
• Personnel trained for assessment
• Implementation during/after disasters
• Classification of structure importance
• Precedent examples (Japan, Christ Church)
• Feasibility of programs developed by other organizations
• Transferability to other disasters (focusing on earthquakes for this project)

We will be looking deeper into these topics, researching past information and findings, discerning liability issues, and giving recommendations based on our findings. We will also identify aspects of the project that may be subject to more complicated systems than originally inferred.

Additionally, Dorit pointed us towards a number of individuals involved in these other projects and aspects of emergency management, such as the BC housing documentation – a province wide rapid damage assessment program. We are planning on establishing contact with a few of these individuals in order to take their experiences into consideration within this project.

We have planned to outline the scope and tasks that we are prepared to tackle during the duration of this project clearly – we will then confirm this information with Dorit in order to ensure that both the team and the client are working towards the same common goal, and are clear about the deliverables that are expected with this project.

It was agreed that a report will also be produced and delivered to the client, as well as a presentation outlining what the team has accomplished. The dates of both of these deliverables are tentative, but will be confirmed once we have more information of the timelines assigned within the class.

This week we contacted our client, Dorit Mason to set up a meeting. In this meeting we will discuss the goals of our project, as well as key negotiable and non-negotiable constraints. We will also use this time to learn more about the scope of our project and how we will be interacting with NSEMO over the coming months.

In preparation for our meeting, this week we researched other Rapid Damage Assessment programs. Our team examined two programs: the first was New Zealand’s “Building Safety Evaluation”, and the second was the “Toolbox Method Of Combining Systems” by UBC and APEGBC.

New Zealand’s Building Safety Evaluation is broken into two steps, and is done by trained engineers or by contractors in the construction industry. The inspection is composed of an initial “level one assessment” and a second “level two assessment” for important buildings and for buildings that did not pass the level one assessment. The combination of these two inspections allows for trained professionals to use their time efficiently and evaluate structures in a short period of time. New Zealands’s Building Safety Evaluation has many important points to consider; it’s algorithmic approach to disaster relief was of particular interest to our team.

The second chosen project was completed by engineers and geoscientists at UBC and APEGBC in response to the government of BC realizing that various other buildings of importance required seismic upgrades. The plan detailed a three-pronged approach called the Toolbox Method of Combining Systems. The Toolbox Method takes into account the combination of  individual lateral systems to the overall structure.

The three steps of this method are:

1.      The Assessment of the existing structure

2.      The considerations of upgrading steel and wood

3.      The considerations of removing brick, masonry, and clay walls

The toolbox method takes into consideration the soil present, the seismic risk, and the structural importance into calculations. Although this method was originally meant for retrofitting buildings in preparation of seismic activity, it easily could be applied to post-disaster assessment situations.

While it is too soon to delve deeply into the technical details of our own RDA program, the research we completed this week will be invaluable for the future of our project. We feel that this is a promising start and look forward to meeting with NSEMO to discuss technical details of the project.