Report of the President

Dear Colleagues,

This is the third meeting of our Executive Committee. The previous meeting was held in Paris, on the 27^th of June, last year.

May I recall first that we had to deplore two intense earthquakes in Turkey, one particularly devastating in August last year, and one near Athens in Greece. All these events concentrated a lot of energy, and many of our members were involved in the analysis of these events, either in missions shortly after the earthquakes or in analytical work.

Since our last meeting, the life of our Association has not been very active, and I regret very much that we were not able to organise either a Regional Seminar or other activities related to Education in conjunction with the work of our working and task groups.

Some members of our national associations were involved in the work of conversion of the EUROCODE 8 ENV into a European Norm (EN). This is a very important job which will give to a great number of our European countries (even for those not affiliated to CEN) a common basis of safety against earthquakes. As far as I am concerned, as vice-president of the SC8 and as French technical contact, I had a lot of work to complete and I trust that the other members of the Task Groups were also very busy. Major progress has been made during this period, which have taken into account recent research and experimental results obtained in Europe (f. i. in Ispra laboratories) and elsewhere.

Our Secretary General will give us a rundown later on in the meeting on what has been happening during this year. I would like to thank him for all his efforts during that time made particularly difficult given all these events in Turkey. We shall also approach later a point concerning the activities of our groups.

As I already proposed during our last meeting, I think that we should try to improve the functioning and the rules of our Association to take into account the evolution of the political and economical situation in Europe. We also have to consider that it is more and more difficult to obtain financing for our activities, even for meetings taking place at longer intervals. So the improvements that could be imagined to the functioning of our Association can be done only with the volunteer work of the participants in our Executive Committee and to the working and task groups. Therefore, I think that the rules for the designation of the members of our Committee should be changed to better take into account their motivation.

In fact, we have the choice between doing nothing, which is probably not the best for the future of our Association, doing slight modifications and thirdly making a full renovation of our statutes and way of functioning. But we also have to take into account our history. This question will be discussed later during our meeting.

We have this project to set up a chart for the post-earthquake missions.

We also envisaged during our previous meetings the way to constitute a kind of network, but there was no significant progress on that subject.

Probably we can consecrate some time to these subjects during our meeting.

Finally, I thank all of you who have been able to be here and I trust that our works will be useful for the future of our Association.

Philippe Bisch

September 16, 2000