Ken O'Dell, SE
President

President’s Message March 2020

To say this is an unusual time, may be a serious understatement. I write this after just receiving notice that my daughter’s high school will be closing until at least April 20. While I will come back to comments regarding converting challenges to opportunities, I first want to highlight some good news.

After convening over several diligent meetings, our nominations committee brought forth a fantastic slate of Board of Director candidates for ensuring the continuity of the Association’s mission. Under the guidance of Bob Lyons as Chair, our nominations committee (Kelsey Parolini, Matt Barnard, Brian Seamer, Lorena Arce, Liz Mahlow, Jesse Karns, Nils Fox, and Mehran Pourzanjani), with the Board’s concurrence, is pleased to put forth the following slate of nominees to serve as the 2020-2022 Director’s class, (as many will attest the term “class” is indeed appropriate given how much you learn as a Director). This year’s nominees include:

Additional information including biographies and next steps of the confirmation/voting process is provided later in this Newsletter. Please join me in congratulating and welcoming these individuals to the Board starting July 2020.

In other exciting news, we are pleased to share that a new Student Chapter has been recognized on the Cal State Fullerton campus. The students from the Society of Structural Engineers at CSUF will be now known as Student Members of SEAOSC as well through the student chapter affiliation. One of our focuses as a Board this year has been to continue solidifying these relationships with future leaders of our profession; be sure to welcome our new CSUF-based members at your next opportunity.

Our committees have remained engaged and continue to bring forth great ideas. The Wood Committee is now up and running and beginning new discussions with the Seismology Committee regarding CLT and cantilever wood diaphragms. I’m sure we will see more information as they team together to expand our expertise. Of course, our education committee continues to bring presenters to our dinner tables and will be working to provide us some webinar-based opportunities as we all reduce external conference activities. We should also celebrate the work recently completed by our Communications Committee as they have worked to answer a request from the Policy Breakfast attendees in October of last year. We are now poised to release a New Buildings Fact Sheet to help explain levels of building performance to the general public. It is clear our committees are actively fulfilling their role in supporting the Mission of SEAOSC to empower our members and advance the Structural Engineering Profession in service to our community.

As we empower each other and look to serve our community, it may be appropriate to see the current situation with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) as a time to confirm we are all prepared to serve when called. Many of you are volunteer responders through the Cal OES SAP program, and all of us are in a profession that is called to protect the health, safety and welfare of the public; not just our clients. We do this in many ways - usually focused on the built environment. While this focus does not change under our current situation, the situation can help us ensure we are prepared. Now would be a good time to test our own capacity to deal with unknowns and the heightened awareness and sensitivity to the societal issues occurring around us. We can test our own resilience and capacity to work and connect remotely. Perhaps we can convert the challenges we are faced with today as an opportunity to test or put in place processes to be able to respond to a disaster such as an earthquake where we may have limited access to the office, or we may need to make alternate care arrangements for our families to shelter-in-place if schools or other accommodations become severely damaged and are not occupiable.

As you know, we started this year with a real-time test of our new SEAOSC Disaster Preparedness Plan, this plan helped shape ease of communication to our members and the community. Today’s situation is further testing that plan as we work through the dynamic process of decision making and information gathering. We are also learning how to respond to a rapidly changing situation, what was a good idea yesterday may not remain a good idea today. Our plan and your plans need to have flexibility integrated into the decision-making process. The current situation also highlights the good, and perhaps sometimes bad, power behind social media and the 24-hour news cycle. Discussions today seem to be significantly different than they were just 10-years ago when the Swine Flu infected nearly 61 million people in the United States (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html). This is NOT a commentary on the discussion or response then and now. It is only an observation that our experience responding to past earthquakes or disasters can shape, but will not be same as, our response next time. Our plans must be informed by, but not reliant on what we did or didn’t do last time. I suggest that we all test our plans now, make the necessary changes (or create a new plan) and take this opportunity to be assured that you and your team can respond when called.