Standards are used as a means to ensure specific qualities are met or processes are followed, in areas throughout our lives. From the shingles on our roofs, to the monitor for our computers, to the crayons that our children draw with, standards are used as a means to ensure safety, quality, and uniformity. This presentation will review what a standard is, how they are developed and updated, how NIST’s Disaster and Failure Studies Program plays a role in the standards process, and will introduce the development of a new standard to estimate the wind speed in tornadoes and other damaging events.

Shannon Van Zandt
Professor & Executive Associate Dean
College of Architecture
Texas A & M University

Shannon Van Zandt's scholarship is at the intersection of affordable housing with disaster impacts, resilience, and recovery, with particular interest in how residential land use patterns exacerbate or mitigate exposure to natural hazards, specifically flooding. She focuses on pre-disaster planning that prevents the exorbitant costs, both financial and on individual lives, that recent hurricanes have wrought on coastal communities, as well as how to mitigate these events in the future.

Nearly every American community has been shaped by historic racial/ethnic segregation resulting from overt discrimination in the real estate, lending, and development industries (“redlining”). These preexisting patterns have been shown to be critical predictors of both damage and recovery, since they influence not just hazard exposure, but also both physical and social vulnerability. Van Zandt will show how this structural racism has been manifested over many decades in communities’ land development patterns, infrastructure investment, and overall maintenance, which has led to disparities in damage, which in turn exacerbate inequities in recovery. Over time, these forces—originating with racial discrimination dating back to the 1930s and 40s—appear to contribute to the permanent displacement of more vulnerable residents and redevelopment of previously affordable housing into less affordable housing types, favoring affluent stakeholders but limiting the availability of much-needed housing

Paolo Bocchini
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Lehigh University

Dr. Bocchini is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of Lehigh University. His research is related to the application of probabilistic concepts, computational mechanics, operational research, and other analytical and numerical tools to civil engineering problems. Currently, his main focus is resilience assessment and optimal allocation of resources for the design, retrofit, and recovery of infrastructure systems subjected to extreme events. He leads large interdisciplinary teams and published his research in premiere archival journals; his paper on resilience and sustainability is the most cited in the ASCE-Journal of Infrastructure Systems.

This presentation discussed possible solutions to the challenges that arise from regional analysis, such as the need for multi-scale models and the extensive use of accurate but efficient surrogate models, the necessity to go beyond site-specific hazard representations; the importance of capturing the role of humans-in-the-loop and their decision making, as well as the complex dependencies and interdependencies emerging among the various agents in these complex situations.

Mark Levitan
Research Engineer, Structures Group
Engineering Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology

Marc Levitan is the Lead Research Engineer for the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He has over 25 years in research on tornado, hurricane, and extreme wind effects on buildings and structures. With respect to tornado research, Dr. Levitan served as lead investigator for NIST's National Construction Safety Team technical investigation of the Joplin tornado, as well as for the NIST study of the 2013 Moore tornado. Dr. Levitan also leads implementation of many recommendations resulting from these investigations, including chairing: the SEI committee developing tornado load provisions for ASCE 7-22; the ICC committee that developed the 2020 edition of the ICC 500 Storm Shelter standard; and the ASCE/SEI/AMS committee developing a new standard on Wind Speed Estimation in Tornadoes.

This presentation provided an overview of the development of tornado load provisions proposed for incorporation into ASCE 7-22. These provisions are based on the wind load framework provided in ASCE 7-16 for other types of windstorms with modifications for tornadoes. Design speeds are defined using the first-ever engineering-derived probabilistic tornado wind speed maps, which also account for the dependency of tornado risk on the plan size of the building or structure. Unique tornado characteristic such as the bullnose-shaped vertical velocity profile, strong updrafts, and atmospheric pressure change are also accounted for. These tornado load proposals are currently working their way through the standards approval process for inclusion in ASCE 7-22.