Civil Engineer Assesses Damage To Chiles Hospitals

Judith Mitrani-Reiser, an assistant research professor of civil engineering in Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering, recently spent a week in Chile looking at how well buildings and infrastructure had withstood the magnitude 8.8 earthquake that struck the nation on Feb. 27. Mitrani-Reiser studies safety and economic issues associated with structures, how structural risks can be communicated effectively to the public and how policy-makers and emergency-management leaders can make better-informed decisions regarding these risks.

In Chile, she was part of a team assembled by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, based in Oakland, Calif. One of her fellow team members was Thomas Kirsch, co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of operations in the School of Medicine’s Department of Emergency Medicine.

In an interview with The Gazette, Mitrani-Reiser spoke about her observations.

Q. What did you study during your week in Chile?

A. We focused on the health care system of Chile as part of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s reconnaissance effort. Our hospital team was funded by EERI’s Learning from Earthquakes Program, the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response and FEMA.

Our aim was to assess the physical and medical performance of public hospitals in Chile after the earthquake, looking for vulnerabilities that can negatively affect patients and reduce the hospitals’ ability to offer regular services. An additional goal was to develop a survey tool to collect data on how the roles of various health care facilities changed as a result of the extent and type of damage that the buildings received.