Incoming ASCE President-Elect Carol Haddock doesn’t mince words.
So when she starts talking about community resilience, it doesn’t take long for her to get to the heart of the matter, which, to hear her tell it, is literally the heart of the matter.
“There are dollars and cents involved, yes,” Haddock said at a recent ASCE briefing on Capitol Hill about infrastructure resilience. “But what we don’t measure is the impact to the families and to the communities – the ways these disasters impact people.”
Haddock spoke during a panel discussion with ASCE Executive Director Tom Smith, the Society’s Chief Resilience Officer Jennifer Goupil, and Aaron Davis, deputy executive director for BuildStrong, Sept. 8, before congressional officials and staff at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C., announcing the release of ASCE’s updated toolkit, Pathways to Resilient Communities: Infrastructure Designed for the Environmental Hazards in Your Region.
The toolkit provides guidance for civil engineers, community leaders, and other stakeholders to adopt and implement modern building codes and standards that are responsive to extreme weather and environmental threats.
As someone who served as the director of public works for Houston when Hurricane Harvey hit the city in 2017, Haddock knows all too well about the human toll of extreme weather. She passionately made the topic of community resilience a personal one.
“Look at the structure on the right,” she said, pointing to a photo of a structure built in the floodplain not up to modern building codes that was utterly destroyed by Harvey. “I wouldn’t want my family living in that structure. I wouldn’t want the quilts that my great-great-grandmother made in that structure. And that’s why these building codes are so important.”
The Pathways to Resilient Communities toolkit is interesting because it not only make the case for resilience but also helps map a plan for action: better design standards lead to better building codes; better building codes lead to more resilient communities.
ASCE initially released the toolkit in 2023, including ASCE 7-22, Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Building and Other Structures. Among the updates in the new edition, the toolkit now highlights costs associated with natural disasters and incorporates updated standard practices for sustainable infrastructure as outlined in ASCE 73-23.
“Resilience is really the key to any community,” Haddock said. “But resilience doesn’t just happen. It takes years and years of investment.”
Download the new toolkit.
