Strategic Goal: Disaster-Resilient Buildings, Infrastructure, and Communities

Reduce the risk and enhance the resilience of buildings, infrastructure, and communities to natural and manmade hazards through advances in measurement science.

With a large percentage of the nation's buildings and infrastructure clustered in disaster-prone regions, EL is developing measurement methods, models, and predictive tools that will help to make buildings, infrastructural systems, and entire communities safer and more resilient in the face of natural and human-made hazards.

Through research that stretches the limits of measurement science and pushes the envelope of current measurement and test capabilities, EL will:

• Strengthen capabilities to resist earthquake effects, improve safety, and enhance resilience of buildings, infrastructure, and communities; 
• Increase the safety of building occupants and the performance of structures and their contents by enabling innovative, cost-effective fire protection technologies;
• Improve the resilience of communities and structures to fires through innovative fire protection and response technologies and tactics; and
• Develop performance-based standards and metrics for the design of new structures and the retrofit of existing structures to resist extreme winds, storm surge, and fires, and to prevent disproportionate collapse in the face of one or more natural and manmade hazards.