April, 2019 Dinner

Speaker: Elaina J. Sutley, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, University of Kansas

Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Topic:  An Overview of the Longitudinal Community Resilience Study of Lumberton, NC following 2016 Hurricane Matthew

Presentation: PDF

Summary: In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused catastrophic flooding to Lumberton, North Carolina, an inland city in Robeson County with approximately 21,000 people. Impacts from the flooding included all 42 schools in the county, serving 24,000 children, closing for three weeks, and more than 5,000 people placed in shelters or temporary housing by FEMA. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-funded Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning initiated a longitudinal community resilience study of Lumberton. The first field study was performed approximately one month after Hurricane Matthew, and collected data on damage to residential structures, and household dislocation. The second field study was performed approximately one year later to collect data on recovery progress for the same housing samples, and a new sample of businesses. The city was severely impacted again by 2018 Hurricane Florence, after which the Center returned for a third time to document damage to the housing and business samples. At the time of this ASCE meeting, the fourth field study will be on-going. This presentation will provide an overview of the project, the longitudinal study, and recent findings on Lumberton's progress towards recovery after successive flood events.

Speaker: Dr. Sutley is an assistant professor in structural engineering at the University of Kansas. Dr. Sutley's research is at the nexus of structural engineering, social science, and public policy, with an emphasis on woodframe buildings and housing. She incorporates holistic metrics of sustainability and resilience into her research, and focuses on developing interdisciplinary science, particularly with respect to hazards and disaster research. Dr. Sutley has extensive background in seismic design and retrofit, full-scale experimental testing, and numerical modeling of light frame wood buildings. Dr. Sutley is part of the NIST-funded Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. Dr. Sutley currently serves as the chair of the Structural Engineering Institute's (SEI) technical activities committee on the Design of Wood Structures, and as chair of the National Science Foundation's Natural Hazard Experimental Research Infrastructure (NHERI) User Forum committee.