So my brief is going to be about QSEC. Again, I'm Brian Blake, the director of QSEC,

the Eastern Multistate and National Earthquake Assistance,

NEHERP, supporting agency during the FY25 period. So my brief is going to be about our multistate rapid visual screening and FEMA P154 rapid visual screening and critical facility inventory program that we've been

launching now for about three years. So I'm just going to kind of go over that, what it entails, what we're doing, and some of the outcomes that we've had from the program. As Heidi mentioned with her brief, it's really important to note that all of the work that you see that we're presenting today has been funded under the NEHERP program through grants from FEMA as well as the states in our region supporting this work. So this is one of the largest undertakings we've ever done and all made possible through the NEHERP program.

So just at a high level, the purpose of our project is really to create an inventory of critical facilities in our at-risk communities and identify potential seismic hazards through the FEMA P154 rapid visual screening methodology. And so, as we're going along today, just consider that P154, RVS, rapid visual screening, earthquake screenings, I kind of use those terms interchangeably, but RVS is what we call this for short.

So the goal of that is to create an inventory of those facilities and understand which one of the, which of those may need more detailed seismic evaluations or improvements through retrofit or non-structural mitigation, etc. And then ultimately we want to use that data to then update local and state hazard mitigation plans with the findings and also recommended actions so that the facility managers or the local EMA, the communities where we do these screenings at, then that can support their mitigation planning and be the basis for future mitigation funding applications through HMGP or BRIC or pre-disaster mitigation or whatever the flavor and name of the month is for various mitigation programs, especially on the state and federal side.

So that's kind of our overarching purpose and goals. And so what we're trying to do, what this looks like is we've started this in nine states so far. So we've got in our area here in the central U.S. across these nine states. We've got about 200 and between 225 and 240 at-risk counties that are in the essentially moderate seismicity or greater all the way up to the highest level of seismicity. And we're doing these screenings at critical facilities.

So what I mean by that are your emergency operation centers, fire and EMS stations, 911 dispatch centers, law enforcement facilities, as well as jail and jail facilities, healthcare facilities like hospitals and health departments, schools, mostly K through 12, but we have done some higher ed where it's warranted. And then also we have done other government facilities such as your courthouses or your election offices or public works facilities, those facilities that would be critical to post earthquake response and recovery efforts.

All of this again is designed to support the local mitigation planning process and then stimulate future mitigation activity. This is a tremendous amount of data information and lift.

It's the most ambitious thing we've ever done.

Part of this process entails a structural review and a non-structural review of potential earthquake hazards. So on the structural side, we use the FEMA P154 rapid visual screening methodology, RBS, which is in its third edition. This was first created by FEMA back in the 1980s. I believe even our esteemed colleague Mike Mahoney has had a hand in the development of this methodology over the years.

And we do what's called a level one evaluation. So, you know, we're not engineers here at QSEC. So this is the level one evaluation is kind of your first pass level of screening. to identify potential hazards on the structural and non-structural side. So this is an interior and an exterior review. It takes about anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per building. And then what we do is we go around the building, we look at mechanical rooms and unfinished areas to identify if the building is like masonry or steel frame or concrete or wood frame construction, etc. And we look for those clues to identify that and then look at architectural details like are there any irregularities like L or T-shaped or kind of stair steps in the stories of a building.

We look at those things which could affect the potential vulnerabilities of the building. And we look at things like blueprints as well when we can to understand what the level of code the building was built to, if any.

And so that's kind of what we do on the structural side. And while we're doing that, we also do kind of a cursory non-structural review. So we're looking at common post-earthquake areas of concern, especially for your critical equipment. you know, in like fire stations, you've got compressor units and oxygen tanks and things like that. But also things like, are the generators anchored? And if they're gas fired, do they have flexible gas supply lines?

Is there gas service at the building? And if so, is there an automatic earthquake gas shutoff valve? Are the fire suppression systems properly braced? and then we look at above and below ceiling risks as well. All of this data really provides a pathway for mitigation, especially on the gas meter topic. I'm on a personal campaign to reduce the impacts of potential fire following an earthquake.

Just right here is a glimpse of several photographs the 1994 magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake just in the Los Angeles area and natural gas

breaks pipeline breaks and distribution line breaks caused about 130 fires. It took more than three days to put out and that could be prevented with things like the automatic gas shutoff valves. Maybe they're not all prevented but you know if we have an earthquake in one of our communities you know where we've done these surveys and let's say they install 50 auto shut off valves and those things can prevent you know 10 fires at facilities well that is going to be money well spent because you'll have lives and property saved from that so that's one of the big non-structural things we look for and what we do with all this data we collect because we go around we're taking pictures and gathering information about all these buildings is we provide a set of outputs and products for the counties we're working in so it's a very comprehensive report that includes all of the data and information that we gathered all of the FEMA p154 reports the non-structural reports on potential hazards there, whether or not the generators were anchored, and so forth.

And then we also have a summary of building code information for the county as well. So when were the codes adopted that might affect basically the outcomes of a potential earthquake.

And then we have a very cool user interface and GIS database of critical facilities that we've screened. And we're just working on a major update to that, like literally this week. I'm going to show kind of a glimpse of that in a moment. But part of that reporting are we give each facility that we screen, they get an official P154 report and they get a non-structural hazards report. These are These are high level, but they do provide the basis for updating the mitigation plan and the basis for making improvements.

We don't really prescribe any particular mitigation measure, but this gives them somewhere to start as well. We do, though, like give detailed reports on where there were gas shutoff or gas, natural gas service at a facility on a county basis. We give a detailed report of where those facilities were that had gas service and whether or not they had an automatic gas shutoff valve. And if they if the facility had generators, whether or not those generators were anchored properly. So we give those retrofit recommendations there.

These are very easy plug and play reports for hazard mitigation plan and for grant applications too.

And so we do all of this, you know, all of this data is gathered using ESRI GIS tools through every phase of the process, which is quite comprehensive. So it takes anywhere from two to six months or more to complete just one county in terms of actually all the pre-coordination, the going on site, screening the buildings, and gathering the data, and then working with it and reviewing it and having an engineer review it. So we do have a structural engineer involved as well.

So briefly, I'll just show our end user dashboard that we've got. Let me pull that up. And so this is our new product as of today. This is the latest and greatest. So you can filter this by facility type. We can look at only fire stations. This map shows the National Seismic Hazard Map. So again, we're trying to screen buildings that are most at risk. You can, we can look at, you know, any particular county that we want to, and I'll turn that layer off.

And so I'll just use Poplar Bluff, Missouri as an example. So we screen their hospital facility there. You know, it's got just all of the data that we gather. So this is in a high area of seismicity. This particular building is a steel frame built in 2013. And then we've got various P154 RVS details that we provide too. So this was built to the 2006 IBC. It's got all of the indicators for the P154 scoring process that make up its final P154 score. Then we've got areas for comments and you can see photos and things like that. information on the building codes, etc. And then we've got details on the non-structural hazards as well.

So this facility, their generator was anchored. They had an automatic gas shutoff valve. Their egress routes were clear. And then we include some, again, high-level checklists. So this, our photos here, they show the generator and the automatic shutoff valve in the fire suppression and other non-structural components.

This particular hospital,

this is like one of the poster children for earthquake mitigation in our region. They just, they did a fantastic job across the board. But we can add things like, you know, aerial views and things like that. So the counties that we do this work in, they get access to this dashboard, but they can only see their data. Our state partners, they can see all the information across the states.

So that's kind of how we look at this and visualize that data that we collect, in addition to the reports and things like that. But we also use a project management system on the back end for this to really help us through all of the various phases and just keep things organized. It is a, like I said, a tremendous amount of data steps in the process.

This is more than just, oh, we're going to go screen a building for some earthquake hazards. What we're trying to figure out and build is a way to do all of this work at scale, which having been in the thick of it for the last few years is much easier said than done, but we're still kind of learning. Some success stories from this. So we've screened now, this slide is a little bit out of date, we've screened close to 2,000 facilities now since the last few years.

In Alabama, these are some high-level success stories. The county we worked with in Alabama has updated their local hazard mitigation plan already to include recommendations from this work. In Arkansas, their state-funded hazard mitigation project specifically now includes earthquake projects. One of the counties that we worked with, they just applied for this year and they got a grant award of about $75,000 to do gas shut off valves at about 75 or 80 facilities in their county.

Also in Arkansas, we're working with one of the counties that we originally screened, their local public utility was interested in doing a higher level evaluation. So we're working with an engineer right now to do level two screenings and advanced non-structural screenings and then they've taken it a step further too and they're doing a building code workshop in Arkansas next month as part of their Earthquake Advisory Council, their Governor's Earthquake Advisory Council/Seismic Safety Commission. In Tennessee, one county used the data to apply for a congressional appropriation for new emergency operations center for a number of factors that their facility was older, not built to earthquake codes or tornado codes or anything like that.

So they're using this in that way. And we're also working closely with the Tennessee Statewide Mitigation Committee, which Zane Kennedy will speak about later, as well as cooperating on this project with their statewide seismic safety Commission.

We would like to point out that a lot of this back-end development work has been done by

GIS and IT gurus, I call them from the Department of Tennessee Emergency Management Authority, TEMA. They're actually here this week. They've dedicated several hundred hours to this project to make it all work and try and do this at scale.

So that's my last slide. Here is my email and my contact. I'll leave that up for just a second and I'll check out