What does resilience look like? From code work to field work

Description

Within a week of the February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria that killed more than 50,000 people and destroyed housing for more than 1.5 million residents, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) deployed Ayse Hortacsu as part of a two-person advance team to support the Learning from Earthquakes (LFE) program. The team traveled over 1,000 miles in southeastern Turkey conducting field reconnaissance and informing follow-on investigations. In October 2024, she was re-deployed to the field with a multi-disciplinary EERI team, this time to observe the recovery and resilience of the local community, housing, schools, employment, and communication, eighteen months after the initial earthquakes. When not on the field, Ayse leads projects that advance the seismic building codes in the United States and in this presentation, she will share her reflections on the response of the built environment to the earthquakes, impacts of damage on the community, as well as potential improvements for reducing future losses.

Bio

Ayse Hortacsu is Director of Projects at the Applied Technology Council (ATC), a non-profit structural engineering organization headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is originally from Istanbul, Turkey and has lived in California since moving there to study engineering at Stanford University (BS ’00 and MS ’02). Following her graduation, she worked a seismic hazard analysis and blast-resistant design consultant for 6 years and has been with ATC ever since (16 years!). At ATC, she has managed projects on various structural engineering issues that have resulted in over 60 publications to date. Her projects have earned Excellence in Structural Engineering awards from the Structural Engineers Association of California (SEAOC) and have led to preparation of seismic mitigation policy in San Francisco, the U.S., and abroad. Following the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes, she served as the co-lead for the Learning from Earthquakes program of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI). She has also conducted post-earthquake field reconnaissance after Nepal (2015), Napa California (2014), Haiti (2010), and Izmit, Turkey (1999) earthquakes. She is the Vice President of EERI and has served on the Board of Directors for the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California (SEAONC) and EERI Northern California Chapter. She is the founder of Women in Structural Engineering, and a founding member of the Structural Engineering Equity and Engagement (SE3) Committee of SEAONC. Ayse lives in San Francisco with her husband (BS’93, MS’97) and two teenage kids.

The Applied Technology Council (ATC) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation established in 1973, headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over its 50-year history, ATC has performed more than 150 projects that have resulted in more than 300 major reports, guidelines, and other engineering applications, forming the basis of current building codes and standards, and serving to define seismic (and other hazard) engineering design practice in the United States and internationally. Because ATC products are consensus-based and non-proprietary, they are immediately accepted by the profession and hold lasting value to engineering practitioners.