Laura J. Steinberg - News and Communications

Excerpt:
The following is from the 2007 edition of The SMU Research Magazine

When engineering gets personal

By Deborah Wormser

Laura J. Steinberg was an internationally recognized civil and environmental engineering scholar on combined natural and technological disasters even before she experienced one of the most devastating of modern times.

Laura J. Steinberg

Hurricane Katrina changed her outlook in many ways, though not in ways one might expect. It did not, for instance, make her think of engineering in more personal terms. The SMU professor of environmental and civil engineering always has taken engineering personally. The goal of environmental and civil engineering education, Steinberg says, is to create engineers who think deeply about the way people live and who design projects that benefit the communities in which they are built. “In doing so, it is important for engineers to consider how people will interact with these projects and to be sensitive to the local culture and environment.”

“I’m interested in the education of civil and environmental engineers with a broad view of the world,” says the former Tulane University faculty member who joined SMU in fall 2006. “Those are the engineers who will be able to sit down with local leaders to determine what development strategies a city should undertake.”

While acknowledging that specialization is important to some extent, Steinberg believes that her broader view of engineering will shape the future. “The field is catching up with where I am. In civil engineering this viewpoint is becoming more prevalent and there are more proponents of this view,” she says.

The Hurricane Katrina survivor is known as a leader in the emerging field of NATECH disaster research. NATECH – an acronym of “natural” and “technological” – studies the way the effects of natural disasters can be magnified in urban areas when nature and technology interact. The goal of NATECH research is to engineer safeguards that lessen or avoid the problems in the future.

Steinberg’s international stature stems in part from her fieldwork after the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that hit Turkey in 1999. The quake struck particularly hard in a heavily industrialized region near Istanbul. Disruptions in water service, transportation and emergency response contributed to a refinery fire that burned unchecked for several days. It also caused the release of 200,000 kilograms (kg) of anhydrous ammonia gas to relieve pressure and avoid an explosion in tanks at a fertilizer plant and the leakage of 6.5 million kg of toxic acrylonitrile, used in making plastics, from ruptured chemical tanks into the air, soil and water.

A much-in-demand speaker and consultant, Steinberg holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and Master’s and doctorate degrees from Duke University. In research published in the Natural Hazards Review, and later borne out by the Katrina disaster, she warned that hurricanes striking the Louisiana coast could have massively detrimental effects on industrial facilities, which could lead to environmental problems for local communities. In fact, Katrina triggered the release of approximately 1 million gallons of crude oil from a New Orleans oil refinery, necessitating the abandonment of approximately 1,800 houses and resulting in the settlement of a $330 million class-action law suit against the responsible oil company.

Katrina struck the Louisiana/Mississippi coast on Aug. 29, 2005.

Yet, Steinberg contends, studying disasters and experiencing one are very different. She was a homeowner in an area of New Orleans’ Uptown that the locals call “the sliver on the river” when the long-anticipated “big one” met a textbook example of how public policy shortcomings and interdependence of infrastructure can combine to exacerbate the effects of a natural calamity.

The experience provided many lessons to everyone in the engineering field, but her most immediate lesson was surprising. “It sensitized me to the fact that just putting out scientific information to the public and thinking you can predict the response to that information is wrong because people are much more complex than that,” she says.

For 10 years Steinberg had warned her friends to evacuate whenever a major storm blew toward the bowl-shaped city, bound on the north by Lake Pontchartrain and on the south and west by the Mississippi River and which sits 8 feet below sea level in some places.

As Hurricane Katrina headed for New Orleans, she says, “they remembered my rant and left. I remembered my rant and still had a hard time believing that the bowl that is New Orleans would fill.” Steinberg recalls that she “didn’t completely commit to the effort,” taking only two days’ change of clothes and leaving her cat behind as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight to Philadelphia.

“The upshot is that the imagined unimaginable came true,” she says. Although her house stayed dry, she was unable to return to it for five weeks because some areas of the city remained under 10 feet of water and had to be drained with massive pumps. Then the mayor had to make sure the water and sewer facilities worked and that police and fire personnel were sufficient to ensure health and safety. The city remained under a mandatory evacuation order for several weeks following Katrina. (Her cat survived by hunting, and might have been hunted herself, judging by her new, intense fear of dogs, Steinberg says.)

Her experience led to an ongoing meditation on the term “resilience,” which is used in engineering, urban planning and public policy with slightly different nuances. “I’ve become interested in how one defines ‘resilience.’ I’m now able to think about it in a larger sense. … I started out thinking about resilience as how to rebuild what had been there previously, and now I recognize that resilience is about how to get back to a highly functioning community, even if that community has different needs, goals and characteristics from before,” she says.

Steinberg is seeing that firsthand in New Orleans, where she watches the public debate over whether whole sections of the city should be rebuilt. She strongly feels the citizens of the community, those who will interact with the new reality, should have a key role in making those decisions.

Steinberg, who in March 2006 was invited to speak on New Orleans and resilience at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., emphasizes that in addition to rebuilding the infrastructure, the city must provide encouragement for a stronger community response to future disasters.

A flood street in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

“It is a temptation of disaster management planning to focus too much on the role of command and control systems as well as technological needs to manage disasters. It needs to be recognized that citizen response to disasters will be a key element in effective response and that flexibility in the response process needs to be built into the response system,” says Steinberg, who served as a U.S. Capitol page in high school and long has been interested in government and public policy.

From an engineering standpoint, it is obvious that the I-wall design for the hurricane protection system failed and will not be used again. “Importantly, the basic failure mechanism of flooding that occurred for the interior section of the city was water entering the drainage canals from Lake Pontchartrain and the subsequent failure of the I-walls,” she says.

To remedy that problem, in addition to repairing the breeches in the levees and floodwalls, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers undertook a massive, fast-tracked project to construct temporary floodgates from Lake Pontchartrain to the canal system. When there is no hurricane threat, the gates will stay open so the canals will act as conduits for normal precipitation runoff into the lake. The gates will be closed during hurricanes to prevent the water from Lake Pontchartrain from entering the canals in an effort to protect them from being breached or overtopped, she says.

Although it is unclear whether global warming had anything to do with the severity of the hurricane, there’s no doubt that the destruction of wetlands east and south of New Orleans contributed to the flooding problem, she says.

The hurricane combined with something personal to bring Steinberg to SMU. About three days after the Katrina hit, when everything was chaotic, Steinberg was staying at her sister’s home in New Jersey when she received a text message on her cell phone from SMU Assistant Professor of Environmental and Civil Engineering Alfredo J. Armendariz. He wrote: “Hi, Laura, are you okay? We’re thinking of you at SMU. From, Al.”

“It was one of the kindest gestures I received,” she recalls.

A few weeks later, Professor and Department Chair Bijan Mohraz invited her to spend the semester at SMU. However, she already had accepted dual appointments in Washington, D.C. The first was as a fellow at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) where she worked on the nation’s Critical Infrastructure Protection research and development plan, as well as on risk assessment planning and modeling strategy development for disasters. She also provided background information and perspective for the department’s post-Katrina efforts to improve the emergency response and to reduce both the number of fatalities and the extent of damage in the future.

In her second appointment, as a visiting scientist at George Washington University’s Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management, she continued her ongoing research and participated with the institute in briefings with the Dutch Ministry of Water Resources on Hurricane Katrina response issues, with the Mid-America Earthquake Center on disaster response planning and with the Army Corps of Engineers in a series of meetings on how to prepare for the 2006 hurricane season based on lessons from Katrina.

Mohraz persisted, calling to ask if she would consider filling an open slot for a permanent faculty position. During her interview she was attracted by the quality of the faculty as well as their collegiality. “It’s hard to find that. I think Dr. Mohraz as the chair has done a terrific job of promoting this culture,” says Steinberg, who will take over as chair of the department at the end of the spring semester. Moreover, that collegiality is fundamental to the interdisciplinary research Steinberg considers necessary to solving the world’s most complex problems.

Steinberg was in France recently discussing a possible research collaboration between SMU and L’institute national de l’environnement industriel et des risques (INERIS), the internationally known French institute whose researchers study risks in the industrial environment and work as consultants to governments and industry to manage those risks. In February she spoke at a conference sponsored by the European Commission on “Land Use Plans in Risky Areas” in Milan, Italy. Drawing upon her Katrina work, she talked to social scientists and engineers from throughout Europe about the risks inherent in living and working in hurricane-prone areas.

“The addition of Laura Steinberg to the faculty brings a needed dimension in disaster management and infrastructure protection that I believe an environmental and civil engineering department must provide for 21st-century education and research,” Mohraz says, adding that she has the stature to effectively promote strategic partnerships for the University with government and industry.

Steinberg’s goals include the concrete, such as adding one faculty member a year for the next five years, and the more abstract – educating environmental and civil engineers who are competent communicators able to participate in public policy discussions.

From her sunny corner office she says she hopes recruitment of faculty and students will be aided by the new J. Lindsay Embrey Engineering Building – the first university building in the Southwest to be registered for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council based on stringent air and water quality and conservation standards.

“I love all the light in the building,” she says, “the airiness, spaciousness and new lab facilities.” All those features plus the LEED designation should help in recruitment, she adds.

“I’m looking forward to leading the department, both in terms of faculty and graduate and undergraduate education.”

For more information: engr.smu.edu/about/faculty/lauras.html.

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