WRK Engineers attend ATC-20 Training
WRK Engineers spent the day on the University of Portland Campus attending the ATC-20 Training – Post Earthquake Safety Evaluation of Buildings
An ATC-20 Certified Team
Portland, OR August 18, 2015. As a structural engineering firm with a focus on seismic engineering and community engagement we put a lot of stock in earthquake preparedness. We know that after a seismic event hundreds of thousands of buildings in the region will be damaged structurally and that it is important to inform the population which of these buildings are safe for reentry and which are dangerous and should be avoided. Thankfully the Applied Technology Council (ATC) has created and refined ATC-20, a post disaster building evaluation system that allows teams of trained volunteers to tag buildings as safe or not.
The ATC-20 Training – Post Earthquake Safety Evaluation of Buildings is a 5.5 hour discussion with visual aides covering the ATC-20 report and it’s addendums on evaluation procedure. There is also an added section on structural basics all of the non-engineers who attend. The training provides examples that allow attendees to evaluate building damage conditions, assess the overall risk from the damage, and recommend which of the three placards in the ATC-20-2 Addendum should be posted on the building.
In August the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Oregon Emergency Management and Portland Bureau of Emergency Management, with generous support from the University of Portland, offered two ATC-20 classes and two FEMA 154 classes to building officials, engineers, architects, building owners, emergency managers, risk analysts, Neighborhood Emergency Team (NET)/Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members, and other interested residents and volunteers. We saw this as an opportunity to educate our staff and prepare them to be useful volunteers after an event and encouraged everyone to attend.
We are now proud to say that 100% of our local staff are ATC-20 certified and can now “Rapid Evaluate” buildings if and when the time comes.
About Applied Technology Council
The Applied Technology Council (ATC) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation established in 1973 through the efforts of the Structural Engineers Association of California. ATC’s mission is to develop and promote state-of-the-art, user-friendly engineering resources and applications for use in mitigating the effects of natural and other hazards on the built environment. ATC also identifies and encourages needed research and develops consensus opinions on structural engineering issues in a nonproprietary format. ATC thereby fulfills a unique role in funded information transfer.