Training

I spent most of Tuesday in an online course run by the California Office of Emergency Services, for their Safety Assessment Program. This is training for “second responders”: the architects, engineers, and other building professionals who assess the safety of structures after an event (a fire, a flood, an earthquake, and so on). The training is based, in part, on the ATC20 (earthquake) and ATC45 (storms and floods) post-event investigation methodologies. In short, it’s not the only way to conduct these kinds of investigations, but it’s a recognized standard. It’s not surprising that California offers this training: it’s a wealthy and populous state with high risk for earthquakes, fires, and valley flooding.

This is not my first time taking this course. Rather, it’s a refresher to renew my certification from CalOES. While I have worked on various types of building investigation almost since the beginning of my career, my introduction to full-time second-responder work was 23 years ago and it would have been a lot easier if I had some training before that started.

Work at the World Trade Center site was difficult for a number of reasons, most of them quite obvious. One of them was how few of us had such training before we showed up on site on September 12. There’s more on this topic in “Engineers at Ground Zero.”