Recent Activities of SECED
The UK national society for earthquake engineering, SECED (Society for Earthquake and Civil Engineering Dynamics), has continued to grow in terms of both membership and profile during the last year. The single most important undertaking of SECED during the current period is the organisation of the Twelfth European Conference on Earthquake Engineering (12ECEE) that will be held at the Barbican Centre in London from 9-13 September 2002.
The demands of the organisation of the 12ECEE on the energy and time of SECED members, all of whom work on an entirely voluntary basis, has not prevented us from continuing with a rich and varied programme of our own national activities. Technical meetings continue to be held on the last Wednesday of the month, never drawing audiences of less than 40 or 50 people and frequently reaching 100. During 2001, technical meetings were held every single month except for December and covered topics as varied as:
· seismic effects on buried structures,
· performance-based seismic design,
· seismic upgrade of industrial plant,
· probabilistic seismic safety assessment in the nuclear industry,
· the Bhuj (India) earthquake of January 2001,
· seismic strengthening of non-engineered structures,
· legal aspects of earthquake risk mitigation in Turkey (Professor Polat Gülkan),
· seismic design of composite structures (Professor André Plumier),
· computational methods for dynamic soil-structure interaction,
· vibrations of the Millennium Bridge in London.
An equally full and exciting programme of meetings is planned for 2002, starting with enhanced damping of structures using visco-elastic materials (January) and the El Salvador earthquakes of 2001 (February).
The highlight of the SECED meetings programme is the prestigious bi-annual Mallet-Milne lecture that was launched in 1987 when Professor Ambraseys delivered his memorable lecture on Engineering Seismology. The Eighth Mallet-Milne Lecture, Living with Earthquakes: Know Your Faults, was delivered in May 2001 by Dr James Jackson of Cambridge University. This highly acclaimed lecture, exploring the new capabilities in the detection of active faults through advances in seismology, remote sensing and understanding of earthquake signatures in the landscape, has been published as a Special Issue of volume 5 of the Journal of Earthquake Engineering (copies are available at cost from the SECED Secretariat at seced@ice.org.uk). SECED is delighted to announce that the Ninth Mallet-Milne Lecture will be presented in May 2003 by Professor Nigel Priestley on the subject of Revisiting Myths and Fallacies in Earthquake Engineering.
Another very important activity of SECED during 2001 was the publication of a report by the Research Working Group, led by Professors Roy Severn and Edmund Booth, on the Implementation in the UK of Earthquake Engineering Research. The report arises from extensive consultation with earthquake engineering practitioners and researchers in the United Kingdom as well as discussions with organisations and individuals internationally. The report of the Working Group can be viewed or downloaded from the SECED web site at the following URL: http://www.seced.org.uk/rwp/index.htm.
SECED’s web site at http://www.seced.org.uk continues to be expanded and improved by web master Dr Andrew Chan. The web site receives more than 100 hits per day on average and as a result of the high profile we receive enquiries regarding earthquake engineering from all over the world, including California! The other public face of SECED, in addition to open technical meetings and the web site, is the SECED Newsletter, which continues to be produced to a high quality, with three or four issues every year reporting on news of the Society and of the profession, including many field reports of earthquakes investigated by SECED members. Dr Adam Crewe, who has served as Editor for over 6 years, will now be handing over the responsibility to John Sawyer. Henceforth, the SECED Newsletter will be posted on the web site in addition to being circulated as hard copy. There is also a project, led by Dr Paul Greening, to post as many back issues of the SECED Newsletter as possible (since its inception in the mid-80’s) on the web site in electronic format.
Following the move of our former National Delegate, Professor Amr Elnashai, to the USA, SECED has elected Dr Bryan Skipp as the new UK representative to the European Association for Earthquake Engineering. Dr Skipp will be familiar to many in the EAEE have been a founding member of the Association and a member of the Executive Committee for many of its early years.
Dr Julian Bommer
SECED Chairman 2000-2002